Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's
climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported for
the entire 20th century by the United Nations (a rise so small that you
would not be able to detect such a difference personally without
instruments) shows in fact that the 20th century was a time of
exceptional temperature stability.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in
many people that causes them to delight in going without material
comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people --
with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many
Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct
too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they
have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an
ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us
all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The the basic assumptions of a terrestrial greenhouse effect dismissed as unrealistic

The
following paper is available via Arxiv, which is a non-peer-reviewed
source. Getting extreme skepticism into a peer-reviewed journal is
close to impossible however. In the several sciences that I know well,
the journals are very protective of the prevailing orthodoxies

On
the meaning of feedback parameter, transient climate response, and the
greenhouse effect: Basic considerations and the discussion of
uncertainties

By Gerhard Kramm & Ralph Dlugi

Abstract:

In
this paper we discuss the meaning of feedback parameter, greenhouse
effect and transient climate response usually related to the globally
averaged energy balance model of Schneider and Mass.

After
scrutinizing this model and the corresponding planetary radiation
balance we state that (a) the this globally averaged energy balance
model is flawed by unsuitable physical considerations, (b) the planetary
radiation balance for an Earth in the absence of an atmosphere is
fraught by the inappropriate assumption of a uniform surface
temperature, the so-called radiative equilibrium temperature of about
255 K, and (c) the effect of the radiative anthropogenic forcing,
considered as a perturbation to the natural system, is much smaller than
the uncertainty involved in the solution of the model of Schneider and
Mass.

This uncertainty is mainly related to the empirical
constants suggested by various authors and used for predicting the
emission of infrared radiation by the Earth's skin. Furthermore, after
inserting the absorption of solar radiation by atmospheric constituents
and the exchange of sensible and latent heat between the Earth and the
atmosphere into the model of Schneider and Mass the surface temperatures
become appreciably lesser than the radiative equilibrium temperature.

Moreover,
neither the model of Schneider and Mass nor the Dines-type two-layer
energy balance model for the Earth-atmosphere system, both contain the
planetary radiation balance for an Earth in the absence of an atmosphere
as an asymptotic solution, do not provide evidence for the existence of
the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect if realistic empirical data
are used.

Future
historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's energy
legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement
of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput!
Finito! Done!

This is not just my read of the situation; it is
also that of Paul Krugman, the Nobel
laureate-turned-Democratic-apparatchik. In his latest column for The New
York Times, Krugman laments that “all hope for action to limit climate
change died” in 2010. Democrats had a brief window of opportunity before
the politics of global warming changed forever in November to ram
something through Congress. But the Reid bill chose not to do so for the
excellent reason that Democrats want to avoid an even bigger beating
than the one they already face at the polls.

Not only does the
bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a
cap-and-tax--oops, cap-and-trade--scheme, it even avoids capping
emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility
companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter
regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both
homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient
and the nation's fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas.
This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the
“comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President
Barack Obama had been threatening.

Krugman blames this outcome
on--you'll never guess this!--greedy energy companies and cowardly
Republicans who sold out. But the fault, Dear Paul, lies not in them,
but in your own weakling theories.

The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support.
Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called
United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express
purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It
included major utilities (Duke Energy ( DUK - news - people )) and gas
companies (BP ( BP - news - people )) that stood to gain by hobbling the
coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. Meanwhile, the
Breakthrough Institute, a highly respected liberal outfit whose mission
is to rejuvenate the progressive movement in this country, points out
that environmental groups spent at least $100 million over the past two
years executing what was arguably the best mobilization campaign in
history. Despite all of this, notes Breakthrough, there is little
evidence to suggest that cap-and-trade would have mustered more than 43
votes in the Senate.

This means that lucre is not the only
motivating force in politics. Indeed, lobbyists are effective generally
when they represent causes that coincide with the will of constituents,
which is far from the case here. Voters are reluctant to accept economic
pain to address remote causes with an uncertain upside. Heck, they are
dubious even when the cause is not so remote and has a demonstrable
upside. Take Social Security and Medicare. It is a mathematical
certainty that, without reform, these programs will go bankrupt,
jeopardizing the health care and retirement benefits of tens of millions
Americans. Even though the cost of action is far smaller compared with
the cost of inaction, persuading voters to do something is an uphill
battle.

Yet even in the heyday of the consensus on global warming
there was never this kind of certainty. The ClimateGate scandal--in
which prominent climatologists were caught manipulating data to
exaggerate the observed warming--has significantly weakened this
consensus. But even if it hadn't, climate change is too complex an issue
to ever be established with anything approaching iron-clad certainty.
Hence, it was inevitable that it would run into a political dead-end.

This
is exactly what the Reid bill represents. Indeed, if Democrats
backed-off from their grand designs to cut carbon emissions 17% below
2005 levels by 2020 with sizable majorities in Congress and a “celestial
healer” in the White House there is little chance that they will ever
be able to accomplish anything better at a later date. And if
America--the richest country in the world and the biggest emitter of
greenhouse gases--won't act, there is a snowball's chance in Mumbai that
India or China will.

Of course, authoritarian countries have a
little bit more leeway than democracies to push unpalatable remedies.
But it is not within the power of even China's autocrats to shove an
energy diet down the throat of their people on the theory that the pain
from it will be short-lived because it will trigger a search for better
and cleaner energy alternatives--the totality of the green pitch for
action.

This doesn't mean that there aren't a few more whimpers
left in the global warming movement before it finally passes. On the
international front, the buzz is that the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change currently in the works will be even more alarmist than
the previous one. However, thanks to ClimateGate, it will give greater
play to alternative voices. “Going forward, the general perception won't
be one of consensus,” notes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor,
an expert on energy issues, “but one of increasing appreciation of
disagreement on the issue.”

Domestically, green groups will prod
the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions
more aggressively. But this will be harder to do when Republicans
inevitably make gains in Congress in November. Indeed, they will likely
revive a Senate resolution floated by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska
Republican, banning the EPA from regulating emissions from stationary
sources, which lost by just four votes last month. Global warming
warriors are also talking about fighting the battle for emission cuts
state-by-state. But they will lose on that front too. California, which
embraced such cuts four years ago, is already facing a ballot initiative
in November to scrap the law, as it loses business and jobs to other
states. Indeed, the same collective action problems that prevent global
action on climate change will inevitably bedevil state-level action too.

The
global warming warriors will likely have to go through the five stages
of grief before accepting that their moment has passed and the movement
is dead. Thinkers more sophisticated than Krugman will no doubt point to
many proximate causes for its demise beyond evil Republicans such as
lack of engagement by President Obama, bad economic timing, filibuster
rules, what have you.

The reality is, however, that the crusade was doomed from the start because of its own inherent weaknesses. RIP.

The
following report is from a Greenie site but it still stands out that
Monckton was the only one talking about the science. They had to go to
Warmists not present at the debate to get critical comments --
comments that Monckton could easily have rebutted if asked. Heck! Even
I could rebut them but it has all been said before on this blog

At
the Bowery Hotel in New York on Tuesday, Christopher Monckton, the
Third Viscount Monckton of Benchley, debated Eric Bates, executive
editor of Rolling Stone magazine, on the topic of climate change. Lord
Monckton is an outspoken climate change skeptic, while Rolling Stone
recently published a cover story maintaining that climate skeptics have
enabled polluting industries to murder the climate.

“Well, I think
we should start with what we know,” Mr. Bates said in an opening
statement. “We know that global warming is happening, it’s happening
now, not in some distant future, it’s caused by us and it’s worse than
we expected.”

Lord Monckton, as would be expected, vociferously
disagreed. “I can quote you statistics on cold as often as he can quote
you statistics for hot,” he said. “There is no global warming problem,
there isn’t going to be a global warming problem. Sit back and enjoy the
sunshine.”

The 30-minute debate was brisk, with questions posed
by Mr. Morgan (he compared himself at one point to the actor Denzel
Washington, who played a debate coach in “The Great Debaters”) and
responses and rebuttals limited to a minute apiece.

Mr. Bates
kept largely to the social and economic dimensions of climate change,
railing against the political gridlock in Congress that has repeatedly
stymied efforts to cap carbon emissions, and citing the well-documented
support by polluting industries of efforts to discredit the notion that
human actions were warming the planet.

Lord Monckton, on the
other hand, started a full-throated assault on mainstream climate change
science, citing numerous statistics and research findings to support
his firm belief that humanity had nothing to fear from runaway carbon
emissions.

Some scientists questioned the accuracy of several
facts and figures, however. At one point, Lord Monckton belittled
concerns that rising temperatures at the poles could harm species like
penguins or polar bears. “There is no risk for the penguins,” he said.
“Likewise for the polar bears. There are five times as many of them
today as there were in 1940.”

This assertion – that the polar
bear population has quintupled in the later half of the 20th century –
has no basis in fact, according to veteran bear researchers.

“It’s
not at all accurate, and this is one of the things the climate denier
groups say over and over again,” said Steven C. Amstrup, senior polar
bear scientist at the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science
Center. “There really isn’t any authenticated source for that
information.”

Mr. Amstrup took exception, too, with Lord
Monckton’s assertion that species across the globe were “perfectly
capable” of coping with even extreme temperature rises. “Species are
not, not, not at risk,” Lord Monckton said.

“That’s just simply
not true,” Mr. Amstrup said, citing the steady decline of polar bear
populations in Hudson Bay, linked directly to a sharp retreat of sea ice
in the region.

Lord Monckton also delved into the climate
record, asserting that climate reconstructions from distant eras proved
that the warming being experienced now was hardly unique, and thus no
cause for concern. “It is getting warmer, but it is not warmer than it
was in the Middle Ages, or in the Roman period, or in the Minoan warm
period, or in the Holocene warm period, 8,500 years ago,” he said.

But
Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, said that knowledge of the world climate during these
eras remains sketchy at best.

“There’s no global reconstruction
that goes back to the Roman period. There’s no reconstruction that goes
back to the Minoan warm period,” Mr. Schmidt said. “These things only
exist in the fevered imaginings of the skeptics.” [They exist in history, actually]

The Carbon Bonanza. More government work for the UEA: not only CRU but LCIC too

Like
the Royal Society of London, which has turned itself into little more
than an agent of government, some parts of our universities seem to be
going the same way on board the 'CO2 is bad' bandwagon.

Despite
the inconvenient lack of a climate signal due to human-released CO2, the
carbon campaign unleashed by the IPCC trundles on, with fabulous sums
of money being assigned to it. One participant enjoying the bonanza is
the University of East Anglia (UEA). We have all heard more than was
edifying about CRU, but there is a newer kid on their block: the
[British] Low Carbon Innovation Centre (LCIC).

The
LCIC could easily be part of a government department under the previous
administration, the major climate-related follies of which seem set to
be continued by the new one. And like government departments involved
in the CO2 madness, they have no hesitation in peddling their wares to
schoolchildren, despite the law against political indoctrination in
education.

The LCIC website has (at the time of this posting) a
banner with a sequence of 8 pictures, at least 2 of which show
government ministers from the previous Labour government of the UK:
Benn, Clark, and Miliband (Ed). The picture of Benn could have been
modelled on Soviet agitprop from the 1930s: his fist in the air, behind
rows of happy children also with their arms in the air in gestures of
solidarity. Truly the people are marching forward to the sunlit uplands
under the guidance of their wise masters. (They will of course need
all the sun they can get if renewable energy continues to divert
resources from more sensible methods of mass energy production such as
coal, gas, and nuclear.)

They describe three areas of activity:

(1) Cred

The
CRed System is the perfect tool to engage large communities of
residents and workforces to reduce their carbon emissions and is ideally
suited to address the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, NI 185 and NI186
and other National Indicators as well as more informal community-based
commitments. It therefore meets the low carbon intentions of both public
and private sector organisations with over 70 carbon reduction pledges
to assist behaviour change. Each pledge pathway addresses aspects of
domestic and business emissions including transport, energy consumption,
food, waste and water offering efficiency advice on giving accurate
savings figures.

(2) Innovation Funds

East of England Low Carbon Venture Capital Fund

In
June 2009, UEA, through the Low Carbon Innovation Centre (LCIC), was
provisionally appointed as Fund Operator for an exciting new investment
fund in the East of England. This appointment, which follows UEA’s
success in running the Carbon Connections programme has now been
formalised and since the summer, the UEA team, led by LCIC’s Chief
Executive Dr Chris Harrison, has been working hard with EEDA to obtain
government approval for the Fund. With approval in place, the next
stage was to appoint a Fund Manager who will be responsible for raising
private money for co-investment into innovative, regional SMEs alongside
investments from the £8M pot from the European Regional Development
Funds. The fund will have a broad low-carbon remit and be capable of
supporting a wide range of new and established companies in their low
carbon activities and products through equity investments.

Carbon Connections Fund

Designed
specifically to stimulate and support the transfer of knowledge from
the university research sector into public and private sector
organisations, the Carbon Connections fund supports innovative projects
involving technology or services development, proof-of-concept,
prototyping or testing. From August 2009, projects will typically be
supported up to a maximum of £50,000 subject to agreement of terms. The
Carbon Connections fund is operated by LCIC in collaboration with
Carbon Connections UK Limited.

[Carbon Connections UK Limited is
a company registered in England, Company no.5906083 whose registered
office is at The University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR4 7TJ,
United Kingdom. See here,
where they assert 'Climate change affects us all and we need to act now
to drastically reduce our carbon output.' - a banality followed by a
non-sequitur. Dontcha just love higher education!]

(3) Carbon Consulting

Our
services include; organisational and management reviews of carbon
reduction potential; carbon footprinting for your organisation and its
products; climate change mitigation and adaptation planning; long and
short term staff and community engagement programmes designed to deliver
and measure impact; evaluation for both technological and behavioural
carbon reduction initiatives; and technology evaluation and options
appraisal.

Here they are at work, doing some 'behavioural change'
stuff for some local schools in Norfolk (Hat tip: thanks for this to
reader Dave Ward):

Norfolk Evening News, 27 July 2010

Dave Ward adds:

"We
have 2 local daily papers here in Norfolk - the Evening News, and the
Eastern Daily Press (EDP). Both come under the Archant umbrella, and are
edited in the same offices in the centre of the city. They are also
printed in the same building on the outskirts ....

The
interesting thing is the rather different editorial policies - the EDP
has a much wider coverage and is traditionally Tory supporting, as is
most of Norfolk/Suffolk/Cambridgeshire. The EEN as we call it (used to
be the Eastern Evening News) is aimed primarily at the City and suburbs,
which are largely Labour territory, although that changed at the last
election.

If you only read the EEN you would know little of the
UEA CRU "leak" ... The EDP, by contrast, has featured the saga in quite
a bit more detail..."

I imagine the faithful run these
outreach missions to schools, armed with their computer outputs showing
terrible times ahead, and able to pick, like a Thought for the Day
speaker, on some recent disaster such as a flood or a famine to drive
home the relevance of their message.

The immediate result is
that the youngsters go home wanting to monitor energy use, but the real
impact involves their being told what to do, what to believe, and to
take it for granted that energy consumption must be reduced. Despite
our potential abundance of energy from many sources, energy which is not
only important for our way of life, and our industrial competitiveness,
but which also strengthens our ability to respond to whatever the
climate may bring. Including, in particular, the possibility of
appreciably cooler weather. This readiness is put at risk by fatuous
talk of humans controlling the climate itself.

This is an old, old claim about the destructive effects of nutrient runoff from those evil farms -- but the reef is still there

SEAWEED
is choking the Great Barrier Reef and killing coral, new research has
found. Scientists in one of the largest studies of water quality
pollution on the reef yesterday revealed the shock impact on the $1
billion-a-year tourism drawcard.

Poor water quality on the reef
due to run-off, nutrients and high turbidity was increasing the amount
of seaweed and reducing biodiversity of corals, the study found.

Hot spots include the inshore reef north of the Burdekin River and the entire Wet Tropics zone from Townsville to Port Douglas.

"Seaweeds
are a natural part of the reef," said Australian Institute of Marine
Science coral reef ecologist Dr Katharina Fabricius. "But what we don't
want is billions of algae smothering coral. "Choking is a loaded term
but when seaweed abundance becomes too high there is no space left for
coral to grow."

The study has just been published in the
authoritative scientific journal Ecological Applications. It used data
collated from 150 reefs and at more than 2000 water quality stations
across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park since 1992.

Principal
investigator Dr Glenn Death said seaweed cover increased fivefold under
poor water quality. "The diversity of corals was also affected,
decreasing in poor water quality," he said. "Currently, the water on
22 per cent of reefs - about 647 reefs - on the Great Barrier Reef does
not meet water quality guidelines."

The study predicts that if
water quality was improved in these areas, seaweed would be reduced by
more than one-third and the number of coral species would bounce back by
13 per cent.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park extends 2000km along the northeast Australian coast and covers 345,000sq km.

Energy star ratings in disarray and the Gillard government has no reply

LABOR'S
push to cut greenhouse gas emissions through the use of energy
efficiency schemes was yesterday dealt another blow when building
industry heavyweights discredited the star ratings being applied to
hundreds of thousands of homes.

Investigations by the building
industry have found that the mandatory star ratings scheme is inaccurate
and fundamentally flawed.

The Housing Industry Association and
Master Builders Australia yesterday joined scientists in calling for
urgent action by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency
to resolve problems that are potentially having an impact on more than
100,000 houses built each year.

They said owners were not aware
that mandatory software tools -- used to calculate whether a planned new
house could achieve the minimum five-star energy efficiency rating
necessary to obtain approval for construction -- gave vastly different
results for the same house under identical conditions.

It is
another setback for the government while it is still trying to quell
criticism after the shelving of its emissions trading scheme, the
disintegration of the home insulation program and green loans scheme,
and the subsequent findings that both were fatally flawed, costing lives
and taxpayers' money due to poor planning and execution.

It also
comes after Labor's latest environmental announcements -- the
150-person citizens assembly to forge a national consensus on action on
climate change and the cash-for-clunkers green car replacement scheme --
were widely criticised.

Opposition climate change spokesman Greg
Hunt said last night that the government could not get its
environmental programs right. "We saw that with pink batts, green
loans and cancelled solar programs," Mr Hunt said. "They need to
explain why home owners and builders face this confusing and potentially
costly mess. "They should release all material on this to the public
before the election."

Flaws in the star rating system emerged
after industry bodies, private companies and scientists commissioned
independent studies showing significant variations were being calculated
by the three different software tools when tested on identical
dwellings. The results show that the three software tools, including
the original model designed by the CSIRO, were inherently unreliable.

The
star ratings system was rolled out nationally several years ago and
recently extended to older houses. The findings mean that in some cases
houses that should be failing the energy efficiency test are being
approved and built, while identical houses are going back to the drawing
board for changes and costing their owners more time and money to get
right.

It also means the stated objective of the federal government to cut greenhouse gas emissions in houses is in serious question.

Faulty
software tools will have a greater impact from next year when the
federal government's national energy strategy requires all homes being
sold or leased to be star-rated and for the rating to be disclosed.
Older dwellings, which will not achieve the five- or six-star minimum,
may be punished financially by buyers and tenants.

The findings add weight to the concerns of energy efficiency experts that star ratings are a multi-billion-dollar debacle.

Peter
Jones, chief economist of Master Builders Australia, said yesterday:
"We have independent expert evidence showing us this is a real concern
and it needs to be brought to light and addressed. "There are
unacceptable differences between the star ratings produced by the
software tools when assessing the same house. "We are drawing a line in
the sand and saying, 'Look, the research is overwhelming now; something
must be done', Mr Jones said.

The authorities need to come up
with a solution so that consumers can be confident in the star ratings
and the tools. "As builders, we do not really care (what the tool is)
but we think it is bad policy when it is not working properly."

Housing
Industry Association senior executive director Kristin Tomkins said the
association's independent testing, which showed significant differences
in energy ratings, including a variation of 3.2 stars for the same
Brisbane house, were troubling and undermined the scheme's credibility.
She said builders and home owners needed confidence in the mandatory
energy efficiency programs that cost them time and money.

Industry
sources called for an Australian Competition & Consumer Commission
investigation and said some savvy energy assessors were "gaming" the
star ratings and making a mockery of the scheme by switching software
tools until one delivered the required result.

The Department of
Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, which has recently joined the
CSIRO in investigating problems with the gauges, has said it was
"premature to say there is any significant impact on overall house
ratings or compliance costs".

A department spokesman did not
return The Weekend Australian's call yesterday to respond to the
findings. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong declined to comment.

The long-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, General
Motors' electric car, will cost $41,000, the company announced Tuesday,
leaving consumers to decide whether its environmental appeal is worth a
price far above that of similarly sized conventional autos.

Electric-car
technology has been around for years, but the high cost to make the
vehicles has prevented automakers from producing them for the mass
market. The price announcements for the Volt and its electric rival, the
Nissan Leaf, have been highly anticipated as a result. Nissan, the only
other major manufacturer expected to bring such a vehicle to market
this year, said the Leaf will cost $32,780.

Although the prices
are high, enthusiasts say that electric cars can reach a large, untapped
market for vehicles with little or no tailpipe emissions.

The Volt can travel 40 miles on its battery charge and an additional 340 miles on a gasoline-powered generator. The all-electric Leaf has a range of 100 miles.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama pledged to put 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015.

In
developing the Volt, GM is seeking to fulfill its promise to Congress
during the government bailout to move beyond gas-guzzlers. The company
had been planning the Volt long before it neared bankruptcy last year,
however, as an attempt to leapfrog Toyota in the quest for
fuel-efficient vehicles.

The president has expressed optimism
that automakers will be able to lower the price tag of electric-vehicle
technology. Earlier this month, he suggested that major reductions in
battery costs, one of the primary reasons electric cars are more
expensive, are on the horizon.

Price is only one potential
barrier to mass adoption, however. Consumers must also get accustomed
to plugging the cars in at home. It takes hours to
recharge the vehicles, and in the absence of a network of public
recharging stations, drivers that run out of juice may need a tow truck.

New Scientist has published a rather remarkable leader to go alongside its interview of Phil Jones:

For years, ruthless climate sceptics have harassed scientists,
drowning them in freedom of information requests and subjecting them to
vicious personal attacks. Climategate was merely the public face of this
insurgent war. In that hostile climate, some scientists fired off
personal emails that occasionally lacked decorum. The CRU accepts this.
When will their opponents apologise for their own excesses?

It
would be interesting to see whether the leader writer at New Scientist
can explain from where they got the idea that CRU had drowned under FoI
requests. This was not the finding of the inquiries. The Information
Commissioner specifically told the Parliamentary Inquiry that the level
of FoI requests was nothing out of the ordinary:

I am also
bound to say that I think a figure of around 60 [requests] has been
mentioned. That does not strike me as being an absolutely huge
number...I do recall one example—I think it involved Birmingham City
Council—where an individual made about 200 requests about a particular
allotment site in Birmingham and how that was being developed.

I'd
like to invite whoever it is that wrote this column to provide some
backing for their claim - perhaps someone who is registered at the New
Scientist website can pass the invitation on.

In true postmodern fashion, objective facts have vanished in the mist of a progressive wish.

Obama has now committed $2 billion more of the taxpayers’ money to pursue his solar energy fantasy:

"Abound Solar is supposed to create 1,500 “permanent” jobs, while
Abengoa Solar is promising just 85 “permanent” jobs, according to the
Department of Energy fact sheet, at its plant in Arizona. Add another
3,600 construction jobs, which will disappear after the three plants are
built, and the cost per job created still amounts to $386,000 — which
is more than seven times the median household income in this country."

Forget
for a moment the absurdly high cost of government-created jobs. Forget
the boondoggle, the corruption of handing out huge sums to politically
connected companies. There are more fundamental problems here.

This
is more than a repeat of the 19th century’s error of subsidizing
railroad construction. That effort had disastrous results, with huge
sums and effort wasted. It led to massive corruption, as congressmen
were bribed to continue the subsidies. The roads didn’t pay.

According to Prof. Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College, author of The Myth of the Robber Barons:

"The Union Pacific and Central Pacific were poorly built railroads,
they went broke, and both cost the nation over $60,000,000 to build – a
sum higher than the total national debt just a decade before they were
built."

Here, though, the situation is even worse than simple
crony capitalism, given its unique 21st century twist. The wrinkle is
that at least in the 1860s it was possible to deploy a technology that
could conceivably fulfill its purpose. Trains could potentially deliver
freight and passengers from point A to B in a cost-effective way. No
such claim can be made for large-scale solar power technology, at
present.

It would be bad enough for the federal government to
subsidize the construction of solar power projects if they worked. It
would still be an inefficient use of resources; it would still exceed
its constitutionally enumerated powers; it would still be an immoral
redistribution of wealth to politically connected companies. But at
least in that case American taxpayers — somewhere — might get a Hoover
Dam out of the deal. In this instance, that’s simply impossible.

There
is no known solar technology that can reliably deliver large-scale
power in a cost-effective way. There is nothing even in the research
stages that promises that result anytime soon, if we just throw enough
R&D money at the right company. This is nothing less than a sheer
waste of public funds to create a mere appearance, a chimera to satisfy
the vanity of a powerful Green demagogue longing to appear visionary.

In true postmodern fashion, objective facts have vanished in the mist of a progressive wish.

The
projects can’t actually improve the environment through the deployment
of huge solar panels. Installing large panels takes large tracts of land
in sunny areas, usually far from electricity consumers. That means
building more roads, stringing longer cable, and handling more cadmium
(a heavy metal needed to produce the panels). That’s before even
considering liberal shibboleths like producing copious greenhouse gases
and disrupting the habitat of native desert species.

No matter.
In the manner of applying failed Keynesian economics to energy
production, just build them ever bigger and what seems like a drawback
magically becomes an advantage. Parallel to the economic error, such
projects look only at the immediately visible effects, not the whole
picture.

They can’t actually create power economically. Because
of clouds and seasonal variations, all solar power plants require backup
from other sources, such as coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants.
That’s solving the problem twice, increasing the costs. And that
doesn’t even count the still woefully low efficiency of current solar
technology, technology no one yet knows how to radically improve.

No
problem, according to the postmodernist. Just pretend. Pretend hard
enough and circumstances will comply. No need to feel constrained any
longer by objective reality; there’s no such thing. There are only
different perspectives. Just wish upon a star and your dreams can come
true.

Spot a contradiction in the plan? Just take a “wider
perspective” and all contradictions vanish in the haze of “competing
narratives.” Hegel’s philosophy has been Disneyfied by Dewey’s followers
and the resultant over-made up hag is ravaging American energy policy.

But
reality always has the last word and it’s never soft on self-deluded
dreamers. Unfortunately for us, it’s even harder on those forced to go
along for the ride and pay the fare besides, especially on a train going
nowhere.

Busybodies,
left and right, seem extraordinarily talented at coming up with
buzzwords to justify imposing their visions of a better world at the
cost of our freedom. Environmentalists are a good example.

The
latest in environmental buzzwords is “sustainability.” Of every act we
take with respect to the natural world we must ask: Is it “sustainable”?
My university even has a position devoted to overseeing its
environmental sustainability.

Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong
with the idea of sustainability. Even though it is rarely defined
rigorously by its supporters, it seems to mean something like: “making
sure we leave enough for future generations.” That vagueness is a
reason why it makes such a good buzzword: Who is against ensuring that
we don’t exhaust resources and leave future generations with nothing?

Of
course, libertarians have raised a number of objections to the means by
which many environmentalists would try to ensure that we treat nature
sustainably. It’s not at all clear that free markets are the enemy of
the natural world — and even less clear that government is its friend.

What
is interesting is that environmentalists who are hostile to markets are
blind to how they embody concern with sustainability. In a Freeman
article awhile back I made a similar point about how economists and
environmentalists talk past each other about the idea of scarcity. Much
of that argument applies to sustainability.

Many
environmentalists apparently assume that owners of resources in a free
market have an incentive to use them up as quickly as possible for
short-run profit, with no reason to care about their long-term
sustainability. What environmentalists miss is that in a competitive
market the price system informs us if we are behaving in an
unsustainable way and provides us with the incentive both to restrict
our use of resources and to search for substitutes.

When the
supply of a resource becomes more scarce relative to demand, its price
rises. This signals to users that the good is more scarce and provides
an incentive for them to reduce their quantity demanded, which
“sustains” the resource in ways that would not happen without the price
signal. The rising price also encourages entrepreneurs to look for
substitutes, which will also make the original resource use pattern more
sustainable.

Beyond that, the process of finding substitutes
promotes “sustainability” by providing new ways of solving old problems.
One of the problems with the standard environmentalist view of
sustainability is that it is overly static and seems to assume that our
goal should be to ensure that current patterns of resource use are
sustainable into the indefinite future. The only way to achieve that
goal would be to limit innovation and thereby dramatically reduce or
reverse economic growth, impoverishing billions.

By contrast,
the economist’s conception of sustainability is more dynamic and
recognizes that the goal is not to sustain a specific pattern of input
use, but to create an institutional environment in which human beings
can respond to changes in the demand for and supply of resources in ways
that ensure their wants can continue to be satisfied at progressively
lower cost, leading to the enrichment of all. It is free markets that
create exactly this institutional environment.

One last aspect of
sustainability has to do with the role of government. Both Ludwig von
Mises’s theory of interventionism and the Austrian theory of the
business cycle have at their theoretical core the idea that government
intervention in the market leads to patterns of activity that are not
sustainable.

Intervention creates unintended consequences that
tend to lead to more intervention, which itself creates more problems.
Inflation creates a pattern of capital use — the boom of the business
cycle — that will eventually collapse for lack of real resources. The
current recession is the result of government-caused unsustainability.

The
lesson for environmentalists is that they should see free markets as
friends of sustainability and at least consider that, at both the
microeconomic and macroeconomic levels, government intervention is
sustainability’s enemy.

Compiled
by old frauds. For a start, they left out of their dataset the most
accurate climate record of all: The satellite data. You'll never guess
why! Below is the DT report, with further comments at the foot of it

A
new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has
provided the "greatest evidence we have ever had" that the world is
warming. It is the first time a report has brought together all the
different ways of measuring changes in the climate

The report brings together the latest temperature readings from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean

Usually
scientists rely on the temperature over land, taken from weather
stations around the world for the last 150 years, to show global
warming.

But climate change sceptics questioned the evidence, especially in the wake of recent scandals like "climategate".

Now
for the first time, a report has brought together all the different
ways of measuring changes in the climate. The ten indicators of climate
change include measurements of sea level rise taken from ships, the
temperature of the upper atmosphere taken from weather balloons and
field surveys of melting glaciers.

New technology also means it is possible to measure the temperature of the oceans, which absorb 90 per cent of the world's heat.

The State of the Climate report shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.

And despite the cold winter in Europe and north east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record.

The annual report was compiled by the Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Both
the NOAA and Nasa have stated that the first six months of this year
were the hottest on record, while the Met Office believes it is the
second hottest start to the year after 1998.

Dr Peter Stott, Head
of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said
“variability” in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain,
does not mean the rest of the world is not warming.

And he said 'greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation' for 0.56C (1F) warming over the last 50 years.

“Despite
the fact people say global warming has stopped, the new data, added
onto existing data, gives us the greatest evidence we have ever had,” he
said.

Sceptics claimed that emails stolen from the University of
East Anglia show scientists were willing to manipulate the land surface
temperatures to show global warming.

The scientists were cleared
by an independent inquiry but the ‘climategate scandal’ as it became
known cast a shadow over the case for man made global warming.

Dr Stott said the sceptics can no longer question the land surface temperature as other records also show global warming.

He
pointed out that each indicator takes independent evidence from at
least 3 different institutions in order to ensure the information is
correct. Despite variations from year to year, each decade has been
warmer than the last since the 1980s.

"Despite the variability
caused by short term changes, the analysis conducted for this report
illustrates why we are so confident the world is warming,” he said.
“When we look at air temperature and other indicators of climate, we see
highs and lows in the data from year to year because of natural
variability. Understanding climate change requires looking at the
longer-term record. When we follow decade-to-decade trends using
different data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we
see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”

There
are lots of problems with this report. First, none of these so-called
indicators is globally accurate at the scale of interest, which is
tenths of a degree. In fact no two agree in detail. Notice too that the
satellite data is not shown, even though it is the best data we have,
because it does not agree at all. What other contra indicators are
missing?

Second, if it is warming a little we still do not have
any reason to believe that humans have anything to do with it. These
folks are confusing the political slogan that "warming" is a hoax, which
merely expresses reasonable skepticism about human induced warming,
with the narrow scientific claim that it is not warming, which nobody
actually makes.

Note this howler from the MET page: "The report
points out that people have spent thousands of years building society
for one climate, and now a new one is being created ­ one that is warmer
and more extreme."

Thousands of years of constant temperatures?
Nonsense. What happened to natural climate variability? Crawling out of
the Little Ice Age, which no one wants to return, is rather a different
story than this nonsense sentence.

These people just don't know
how to be other than stupidly green. Fortunately it shows and no one is
fooled. Those days are over.

And for an absolute encyclopedia of
criticisms of the report, just read the "Comments" section at the foot
of the DT report. The the public is not fooled. There is the
occasional "trust the experts" bleat but the comments are overwhelmingly
hostile

Climate change hysteria and “fixes” cause harm

One common
justification for the "climate change" hysteria, is that even if the
climate change believers turn out to be wrong; either that there is
climate change, or that it is caused by human activities, there is
little harm in taking the prescribed corrective measures. Bunk!

Little
harm? The "solution" for "anthropogenic global climate change",
demanded by the collectivists who falsely call themselves
"environmentalists", destroys the ability of regular people to earn a
living. It puts the world's very worst polluters, governments, in
charge of telling everyone else how to live, and punishing those who
disobey. It does worse than sending humanity back to the stone age,
since at least back then they had fire with which to cook food, light
the dark, and heat themselves. It sets up a new caste system, where the
politically powerful, rich, and/or connected get to maintain a modern
lifestyle, while "the little people" are expected to sacrifice most of
the advances of the past several hundred years for "the common good",
while still being expected to not be as "messy" as our forebears. It
also terrifies some people much like the "nuclear annihilation" threat
of an earlier generation did. That is an awful lot of harm.

Modern
society is remarkably clean. Only government deals and favoritism
(corporatism) keep the big polluters (BP) from taking full individual
responsibility, and making full restitution, for their mistakes and
misdeeds. The modern individual leaves less mess behind than the
primitive individual did. It is just that there are an awful lot of us
humans now, and we are being artificially forced, by government fear and
inertia, to stay in our planetary cradle instead of being allowed to
naturally spread out from Earth.

The best way to do what you can
for the environment hasn't changed: Don't soil your own nest, and take
full, individual, responsibility for the mess you do make when it harms
the property or lives of others.

In the interest of full
disclosure, I would be happy to live in a cave under primitive
conditions. Or in a tipi or a dugout. No electricity or running water
(or, as I used to tell my first ex-wife "we'd have electricity during
thunderstorms, and running water when it rains....") The thought
doesn't bother me at all. However, I know most people don't feel that
way. Many people depend on modern advances for their very lives. I
have no business taking their non-coercive choices from them. Neither
does anyone else.

“Science
is the belief in the ignorance of experts” is how the great Nobel
Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman defined science in his article
“What is Science?” Feynman emphasized this definition by repeating it in
a stand-alone sentence in extra large typeface in his article.
(Feynman’s essay is available online, but behind a subscription wall:
The Physics Teacher (1969) volume 7, starting page 313.)

Immediately
after his definition of science, Feynman wrote: “When someone says,
‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly.
Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to
you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you should ask, ‘How does
science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’ It
should not be ‘science has shown.’ And you have as much right as anyone
else, upon hearing about the experiments (but be patient and listen to
all the evidence) to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been
arrived at.”

And I say, Amen. Notice that “you” is the average
person. You have the right to hear the evidence, and you have the right
to judge whether the evidence supports the conclusion. We now use the
phrase “scientific consensus,” or “peer review,” rather than “science
has shown.” By whatever name, the idea is balderdash. Feynman was
absolutely correct.

When the attorney general of Virginia sued to
force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he
used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so
that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of
Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey
stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You
peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions
of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.”

Feynman’s
— and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request
for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has
been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a
chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”

According
the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia, “science,” and indeed
“scholarship” in general, is no longer an attempt to establish truth by
replicable experiment, or by looking at evidence that can be checked by
anyone. “Truth” is now to be established by the decree of powerful
authority, by “peer review.” Wasn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment
to avoid exactly this?

Appeal to authority establishes nothing.
“Experts” who claim otherwise are thereby showing themselves to be
non-experts. The University of Virginia faculty members who supported
this anti-science resolution have shown themselves to be unworthy to
teach at an American university. They have shown themselves to have no
understanding of the meaning of the word “scholarship.”

There are
all too many such professors at the leading American universities.
Which is why Feynman defined science to be a belief in the ignorance of
such people. They are ignorant. Feynman used the expression “cargo-cult
science” to describe the “science” done by such people.

In the
South Pacific during the Second World War, the locals noticed that cargo
planes would fly into airports that had been established on their
islands, and unload vast amounts of goodies. The natives wanted the
wealth too, so they hacked runways out of the jungle, made “radar
antennas” out of wood, and sat at “radio sets” they had also fashioned
out of wood. To their eyes, it looked like the real thing, but alas, no
planes arrived with cargo. The native “cargo-cult” airport had the
superficial appearance of an airport, but not the reality. Many areas of
“science” today have the superficial appearance of true science, but
not the reality. Climate “science” is an example.

How does one
distinguish between science and pseudoscience, between true science and
cargo-cult science? Many believe that Karl Popper’s falsifiability
criterion provides it, but Popper’s criterion has numerous difficulties,
which philosophers have pointed out. Feynman has provided a much better
way to test for true science in his essay “Cargo-Cult Science”:

… there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo
cult science. … It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of
scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind
of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment,
you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not
only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly
explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated
by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other
fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Compare Feynman’s
scientific integrity with the continual attempts by the leaders of
climate “science” to prevent skeptics from checking their data. True
scientists would be extremely pleased to provide all raw data, and they
would make the data available to all on the Internet. A state attorney
general would not have to file suit to make them disgorge.

(1) 'Children born today will not be in a position of influence for 40 years, and by then it will be too late.'

The
claimed lack of influence of children is belied by the efforts of
Schools Low Carbon Day to make them into political and commercial
actors, influencing their parents and others to change lifestyles, and
purchase so-called 'green energy tariff' electricity from a particular
company.

I have found several more such sites. They are intent on
indoctrinating children to toe the 'party line' on the environment.
Children old enough to be scared, old enough to be influenced, but too
young to fight back against the propaganda.

Here is one EU-funded
boondoggle explaining itself: 'The main idea is to enable the pupils
to learn about the challenges of global climate change and sustainable
energy use and, at the same time, acquire the competences necessary to
develop and subsequently apply adequate solutions.'

by means of:
'The European project “Schools at University for Climate & Energy
(SAUCE)” offers a series of one-week on-campus education programmes for
pupils ages 10-13 on the topics of energy efficient behaviour, renewable
energies and climate change.'Source: (2).

They were at it in
London in June, where they set out to: 'develop education in climate
awareness, offer smart energy choices for 10 to 13 year olds'

Too young to answer back, old enough to hassle their parents. Does that explain this sinister choice of target group?For more see: (3)

Here
is a site which is quite blatantly majoring on fundraising via
children: 'School children across the world have made an incredible
difference to rainforest protection by fundraising for Cool Earth.'

and they note: 'Schools play a really important part in raising awareness about climate change'Source: (4).

Here
is another site not so convinced that 'children will not be in a
position of influence for 40 years'. They ask: 'What do you think will
happen if one million of us marched, each in our own home towns, to
send a message to the “ruling generation” that is so powerful that it
actually causes a real shift in our world? Sign up to be an organizer,
leader or marcher!' Source: (5).

Here is the Pew Centre, a
prosperous-looking lobbying organisation by Washington DC, getting in on
the game: 'To help more kids better understand global warming, the Pew
Center recently collaborated with Nickelodeon to research children's
and parents' attitudes and behaviors toward the environment. Nickelodeon
is using the information for an interactive campaign called The Big
Green Help. There's a lot you can learn about global warming. To help,
this page provides answers to six key questions about global warming,
how it occurs, and how you can help to stop the process.'Source: (6).

Or
how about this anonymous site, probably in the UK, and aimed at 5 to 11
year olds: 'If your parents must use the car, ask them to avoid using
it for very short journeys if possible, as this creates unnecessary
pollution. Try to encourage them to share their journeys with other
people, for example when they go to work or go shopping. Also encourage
them to drive more slowly as this produces less pollution and less
carbon dioxide.'Source: (7).

What kind of results are such
sites and initiatives getting? I only have some 'for-instances'. These
folks are pleased: 'Because children are such strong catalysts for
social change, the program has had wonderful results.'This quote from a campaigning site aimed at children by a couple who were convinced by, of all things, 'An Inconvenient Truth'.Source: (8).

And
in the news this week from Boston: 'Totalitarians throughout history
have understood the power of co-opting youth, and here is an
organization advocating what can only be called the indoctrination of a
generation of students in our country's public schools, beginning in
kindergarten, into radical environmentalism and advocacy for "equitable
social systems" -- at the expense of reading, writing and arithmetic!
Similarly, the physics teacher quoted above states: "Our goal as
educators is to help students understand how to get to a sustainable
world." Isn't your goal as a physics teacher teaching physics? The
disregard for the essential purpose of education -- -imparting knowledge
-- is aggressively blatant.'Source: (9).

Not so recent, but
alarming all the same is the set of often illiterate letters from pupils
organised by a teacher in a Californian school, to berate the Heartland
Institute for not taking the correct line on climate. They include
such gems as:

'In the past couple of months, we have read
articles about Global Warming and we know facts about G.W. The 1st
article is Diesel traffic makes asthma worse. The article explains that
diesel traffic can worsen lung function in people with asthma. The 2nd
article is Air pollution shrinks fetus size. This means that if
mothers have higher exposure to air pollution, the child's fetus will
shrink. The 3rd article is World Must Fix Climate in Less than 10
years. This means that if we don't fix the climate, everything will be
destroyed and we won't be able to survive. Those are all the important
articles we read.' The anonymised letters can be downloaded from:
(10).

I leave the last word on this misuse of schools and
exploitation of children, to an American journalist offended by some
climate change ads using children for scaremongering. I'd extend his
remark to include all those initiatives in and around schools on climate
scaremongering: 'I don't know about you, but irrespective of my
position on this issue, I find using children in this fashion to be
indefensible and way over the line of decency.' Source: (11). .

(2) 'The inertia in the climate system ...'

The 'inertia of the climate system' is not defined, but it may refer to remarks by James Hansen in 2009.

From
the climategate emails, we read a message from Trenberth, on 12th
October 2009, cc'd to, amongst others, Hansen: 'The fact is that we
can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty
that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09
supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data
are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.' Source: (12).

Hansen
speaking about two weeks later in over-the-top demented alarmist terms
well-suited for the Club of Rome, has found somewhere to hide the
missing heat: in a pipeline, aka a timebomb. His talk was entitled
'Global Warming Time Bomb', and his slides included one with the device
'Climate Inertia -> Warming in Pipeline'. Source: (13).

A
more temperate scientist, Roger Pielke Snr writes in January 2010: 'But
unless observations document that significant heat is accumulating
deeper in the ocean, there are no major amounts of unaccounted for
Joules in the climate system. There is therefore no “unrealized heat”
and, thus, no “heating in the pipeline”.' Source: (14).

I'm more convinced by the analysis of Pielke, than by the conjecture of Hansen. No pipeline, no timebomb, no scary headlines.

(3)
'... means that without action from us, by the time they can change the
world, catastrophic warming will almost certainly be factored into the
system.'

Why would that be? The 'almost certainly', as we
have seen in earlier posts in this series, ought to read 'almost
certainly not' given the complete lack of evidence of any extraordinary
cause for concern, in particular from CO2. Many scientists accept that
CO2 alone could change average temperatures anywhere between a modest
decrease to an increase of around 1C. No grounds for catastrophe there.

Any such changes would scarcely be detectable against the
background variation which is part and parcel of our climate. So, it
comes back to the computer models. The Club of Rome had such an impact
with their now widely ridiculed modeling, that I can't help but feel the
plotters behind the IPCC were keen to make the most of the climate
modellers' arts. Especially those who invented a positive feedback
mechanism that allowed the modest impact of CO2 to be converted into a
dramatic effect due to water vapour.

They might well have hoped
to rely on the same lack of critical review which the media gave to the
Club of Rome, and if so they were surely right. No one expects high
standards from the media, but once upon a time, we expected it from
science. Scientists once revered as objective seekers after truth have
been transformed into jobsworths seeking security of tenure and larger
research grants, both of which were jeopardised by going against the
received wisdom on climate.

But hope springs eternal: the recent
rebellion by fellows of the Royal Society was one bright spark, and here
is another from a journalist recognising failings in her profession:

'These
are desperate days for global warming advocates, and they should be.
The two groups we rely on the most to be skeptical and detail-oriented,
scientists and reporters, have continued to badly fail us.' Source:
(15).

In my more charitable moments, I suppose that the founders
of 'Schools' Low Carbon Day' were merely badly failed by scientists and
reporters. At other times, I wonder at their enthusiasm for scaring
schoolkids in order to advance their 'green agenda'.

Note:
The lead author of the "study" is an environmental activist -- he
serves as a 'science advisor' to the pressure group Environmental
Defense Fund

Reuters and dozens of other sources promote the
craziness of the day, namely a bunch of statements by a Michael
Oppenheimer of New Jersey and his pals, Shuaizhang Feng and Alan B.
Krueger. The paper was edited by the late Stephen Schneider a month ago.

He
and his friends essentially claim that global warming is going to be
the main reason of the Mexican illegal immigration. Between 1.4 and 6.7
million Mexicans will arrive to the U.S. by 2080 because their
agriculture will get worse, and so on. Of course, this statement is
completely preposterous but the media make it even worse when they
exclusively quote the upper "6.7 million" figure in the title.

The
number of Mexicans who actually move because of the temperatures may be
counted in thousands, not millions. If you check an encyclopedia, the
daily temperatures in Mexico City go from 6 to 21 °C in January to 12 to
26 °C in May (the figures are average lows and average highs in the
months). In average, there's no excessive heat over there. And the
agriculture is not getting worse because of the climate change.

You
may check that e.g. Sao Paolo in Brazil, the agricultural powerhouse of
Latin America, has temperatures by about 6 °C higher than Mexico City.
They're even higher in Rio de Janeiro. Warmth is surely not a problem.

I
think that only insane people may have doubts that what drives the
overwhelming portion of the immigrants is the economy. The Mexican GDP
per capita is 5 times (nominal) or 3 times (PPP) lower than in the U.S.
Well, such things make a difference.

The hypothesis that the
desire for a cooler weather plays an important role in the Mexican
immigration can be easily falsified by anyone who actually wants to know
whether it's true or not. The simplest way to see that it is bogus is
to notice that the Mexicans are satisfied as soon as they cross the
borders and many of them stay in the Southern states of the U.S. Even
though the climate can't change too much a few miles away, the new place
is good enough for them.

I've heard amazing testimonies of
several people who visited the U.S.-Mexican border along the Rio Grande
river. The vast difference in wealth makes it look like two different
worlds. The difference has clearly nothing to do with the climate.

It's
not hard to see what is the driver behind similar "research": they want
to attract some conservative people - people who are genuinely afraid
of immigration, especially the illegal immigration (whether or not their
fears are justified) - onto the global warming bandwagon by giving the
global warming fears some new "anti-immigration flavor". I think that
the descendants of J. Robert Oppenheimer should sue Michael Oppenheimer
and prevent him from using and contaminating the name of their ancestor
and their families - and the good name of physics.

The
authors write that arid central Asia (ACA, an inland zone in central
Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to the southern Mongolian Plateau
in the east) is "a unique dry-land area whose atmospheric circulation is
dominated today by the westerlies," further stating that it is "one of
the specific regions that are likely to be strongly impacted by global
warming," which could greatly impact its hydrologic future.

What was done

In
an attempt to obtain this important knowledge, Chen et al. evaluated
"spatial and temporal patterns of effective moisture variations," using
seventeen different proxy records in the ACA and synthesizing a
decadal-resolution moisture curve for this region over the past
millennium, employing five of the seventeen records based on their
having "reliable chronologies and robust proxies."

What was learned

The
nine researchers report that the effective moisture (precipitation) in
the ACA has a generally inverse relationship with the temperature of the
Northern Hemisphere, as portrayed by Moberg et al. (2005), China, as
portrayed by Yang et al. (2002), and Central Asia, as portrayed by Esper
et al. (2007). That is to say, as they describe it, the "wet (dry)
climate in the ACA correlates with low (high) temperature." And stating
it in yet another way, they indicate that the ACA "has been
characterized by a relatively dry Medieval Warm Period (MWP; the period
from ~1000 to 1350 AD), a wet little Ice Age (LIA; from ~1500-1850 AD),"
and "a return to arid conditions after 1850 AD," which has been
slightly muted -- but only "in some records" -- over the past 20 years
by an increase in humidity.

What it means

Chen et al.
"propose that the humid LIA in the ACA, possibly extending to the
Mediterranean Sea and Western Europe, may have resulted from increased
precipitation due to more frequent mid-latitude cyclone activities as a
result of the strengthening and equator-ward shift of the westerly jet
stream ... coupled with a decrease in evapotranspiration caused by the
cooling at that time," which cooling was brought about by the gradual
demise of the Medieval Warm Period, which in turn speaks volumes about
the great significance of that centuries-long period of
much-lower-than-present atmospheric CO2 concentration but of equivalent
or even greater warmth than that of the Current Warm Period, which
ultimately suggests that the 20th-century increase in the air's CO2
content may have had little, or maybe even nothing, to do with
20th-century global warming.

A BOOK REVIEW OF "The Hockey Stick Illusion - Climategate and the corruption of science"

Review from the magazine of the Geological Society

In
1998 a graph, which was to become famous as the ‘Hockey Stick’, made
its debut in the pages of the prestigious journal Nature. The graph,
constructed by climate scientist Michael Mann and colleagues, purported
to show that late 20th Century temperatures were unprecedented in at
least 1000 years. For many this was the smoking gun of Anthropogenic
Global Warming (AGW). Before long the Hockey Stick became the icon of
the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and took
(unacknowledged) centre-stage in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth.
The scientific community immediately, and virtually unanimously,
accepted the Hockey Stick at face value, even though it eliminated such
familiar episodes of climatic history as the Medieval Warm Period and
the Little Ice Age; these were explained away as regional or diachronous
phenomena.

Not everybody, though, was prepared to take this new
climate history on trust. Foremost among these sceptics was a Canadian
mining engineer, Steve McIntyre. Over several years, in the teeth of
resistance from the paleoclimatological community, he laboriously
collected the raw data (mainly tree ring measurements) from which the
Hockey Stick was derived. McIntyre identified numerous shortcomings with
the reconstruction. The charges included cherry picking of data, use of
invalid proxies and poor statistical techniques, which together
produced a picture of exceptional 20th Century warming that was not
present in the underlying data.

The response of the ‘Hockey Team’
(as Mann and colleagues came to be known) was to circle the wagons.
McIntyre was dismissed as a crank, or a flunkey of the oil companies.
Attempts were made to prevent publication of his analyses in the
scientific press. When these tactics failed to silence him, the Hockey
Team claimed that many independent studies confirmed their results.
McIntyre, though, was able to show that these ‘independent’ studies used
the same flawed data sets and techniques as the Hockey Stick and
inevitably reached the same erroneous conclusions. The debate eventually
reached Washington where two congressional committees concluded that
Mann’s statistics could not support the conclusions he drew from them.
Nonetheless the Hockey Team, with the support of the IPCC, pressed ahead
with their depiction of the Hockey Stick as ‘settled science’.

Andrew
Montford tells this detective story in exhilarating style. He has
assembled an impressive case that the consensus view on recent climate
history started as poor science and was corrupted when climate
scientists became embroiled in IPCC politics. His portrayal of the
palaeoclimatology community is devastating; they are revealed as
amateurish, secretive, evasive and belligerent. But the most serious
charge is that they have simply failed to demonstrate any scientific
integrity in confronting McIntyre. The University of East Anglia emails,
which appeared just as Montford was completing his book, suggest that
the Hockey Team were more interested in knobbling McIntyre than in
addressing his arguments.

The wider scientific community does not
escape criticism. No serious effort was made to subject the Hockey
Stick to independent scrutiny, despite its profound implications for the
future of the planet and its inhabitants. In response to external
challenge the scientific establishment’s reflex action was to side with
the paleoclimatologists without bothering to check the evidence. This
approach, no better than that of any other vested interest group, should
dismay everyone of genuine scientific spirit.

Montford’s book
ends on what is perhaps an inevitable low note, because the Hockey Team
has not conceded that its temperature reconstructions are seriously
flawed. However, if The Hockey Stick Illusion provokes a truly
independent review of the evidence it will have served its purpose.

HOW
MUCH are you willing to pay for green energy? Almost any ratepayer
would say that if the electric utilities could obtain a significant
amount of their power from a renewable source, and do so without raising
rates, then that would be a good deal. It would certainly appear to be a
good deal if they could obtain the power and at the same time reduce
their rates.

For years Cape Wind Associates, which plans to build
130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, told us that it could supply
renewable energy to the New England market and save ratepayers $25
million a year. Considering the cost of installing and operating the
system (about $2 billion in present-value terms), it was always unlikely
that Cape Wind could deliver on this promise. Yet, it seemed possible
that by adding significantly to power supplies, Cape Wind could bring
about at least a temporary decrease in the price of power.

Now we
learn, however, that ratepayers will pay more for their electricity if
Cape Wind builds and goes online. Recently, National Grid entered into
an agreement to buy power from Cape Wind for almost 21 cents per
kilowatt hour. It costs National Grid about 9 cents per kWh to get the
same power from conventional sources. Under the state’s Renewable
Portfolio Standard program, the electric companies charge ratepayers an
additional 6 cents per kWh for that portion of their service (currently 5
percent) that the power companies are supposed to obtain from renewable
sources. Hence, power that previously cost 15 cents will now cost 21
cents. National Grid’s biggest customers are protesting this price
increase.

Under the agreement, National Grid, which supplies 40
percent of Massachusetts’ residential electric power, will buy half of
Cape Wind’s output. The proposal to buy the power at the contracted rate
(which allows for an annual increase of 3.5 percent) is now before the
state’s Department of Public Utilities for its approval. If the National
Grid deal goes through, it won’t be long before another electric
utility finds itself under pressure to buy the other half of Cape Wind’s
power.

If that happens, ratepayers are going to end up paying
$82 million annually more than what they currently pay for the power to
be supplied by Cape Wind. That is far cry from paying the $25 million
less that Cape Wind originally promised. It’s a case of bait-and-switch:
Promise something at a cost saving. Then reveal at the last minute that
the cost will be greater, not less. It’s a practice that would have the
authorities swooping down on any retailer that tried it.

The
Cape Wind project was always a bad deal, in the larger sense that the
subsidies needed to bring the project online were far greater than
justified by such green-energy benefits as it would confer. And now we
find out that the subsidy needed by Cape Wind in order to attract
investors is more than twice what we could originally have expected.

It
is no answer to say that the National Grid deal is good for ratepayers
because fossil fuel prices might rise in the years to come. The Federal
Energy Information Administration does not expect the real cost of
electricity generation to rise for more than a decade. Yet fossil fuel
prices would have to more than double to make the National Grid deal a
bargain for ratepayers.

Nor is there a lack of cheaper sources of
renewable energy. Currently, the state does not permit the electric
utilities to apply hydro or wind power bought from Canadian suppliers to
their Renewable Portfolio Standard requirement. By eliminating this
rule, the state could get all the renewable energy it wants without
compelling ratepayers to pay more than the 15 cents per kWh they
currently pay. The only reason not to use Canadian power or some other
source of cheap, renewable energy is to keep the Cape Wind project
going. But Massachusetts ratepayers should not be expected to bear the
burden of supporting this project when there are cheaper sources of
renewable energy available. The regulators should tell National Grid to
find another supplier.

For 86 days,
oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's damaged well, dumping some
200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the
federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there's
one problem -- they're having trouble finding it. At its peak last
month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly
shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.

Today, ABC News
surveyed a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the
rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen.
"That oil is somewhere. It didn't just disappear," said Plaquemines
Parish President Billy Nungesser.

Salvador Cepriano is one of the
men searching for crude. Cepriano, a shrimper, has been laying out boom
with his boat, but he's found that there's no oil to catch. "I think
it is underneath the water. It's in between the bottom and the top of
the water," Cepriano said.

Even the federal government admits
that locating the oil has become a problem. "It is becoming a very
elusive bunch of oil for us to find," said National Incident Cmdr. Thad
Allen. The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about
25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200
barrels.

Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for
weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface,
but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into
the environment.

"[It's] mother nature doing her job," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

The
light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high
pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process
along. The oil that did make it to the ocean's surface was broken up by
88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped
apart by wind and waves.

Experts stress that even though there's
less and less oil as time goes on, there's still plenty around the
spill site. And in the long term, no one knows what the impact of those
hundreds of millions of gallons will be, deep in the waters of the Gulf
of Mexico.

It
looks like it is finally time to announce Judith Curry's departure for
the dark side, prompted by her comments at RC [Real Climate]. I still
think she has good intentions, at heart, but has been "captured by the
septic narrative" or somesuch. In some respects this intervention is
fairly typical of her previous stuff - which is to say, she mouths off
without having done her homework, then tries to back off. But the
direction she mouths off in is very revealing.

So, where to
start. Curry commented at RC in defence of Montford and Gavin answered
her. Presumably she thought at the time she was being sane. But then
Romm (ht: H) made a post out of the comment / reply which really reads
very badly for her, and Curry threw her toys out of the pram: OK, I
officially give up over here. Here is something I just posted over at
climateaudit...

She then appears to go on to argue that all the
stuff she said before wasn't her, it was merely her parroting Montford:
"These were not my personal arguments." I don't believe that, nor do I
think that you can read that from her orignal RC comment. Nor, indeed,
can I see why she would want to show up at RC merely to parrot Montford -
he can do that himself if he wants to.

The bit of Curry's comments that I would pick out of RC are

The high level of confidence ascribed to the hockey stick inferences
in the IPCC TAR, based upon two very recent papers (MBH) that, while
provocative and innovative, used new methods and found results that were counter to the prevailing views. Plus the iconic status that the hockey stick achieved in the TAR and Al Gore's movie.

I've
bolded the bit that is especially significant. This is so much a part
of the septic worldview: that IPCC '90 fig 7.1.c was God's Glorious
Revealed Truth in the Age of Gold and everything since then has been
downhill as the evil climate so-called scientists manipulated their data
to erase the MWP and LIA etc etc. Gavin points out why her view is
wrong.

There is quite enough noise in the "climate debate"
already. We don't need any more. Nor do we need people making hasty
ill-thought out comments that they will later pretend not to have meant.
Curry needs to back off and find time to write down a coherent position
that she actually believes in.

Oops, and I missed Curry's other embarassing comment at CP. Speaking of Craig Loehle I ought to link to Eli before he does.

(Kerry
suggests that because of CO2, plants no longer grow in a 100-mile swath
of the US?! The man clearly knows nothing of science. CO2 FACILITATES
plant growth! Plants lap it up)

Speaking at a town
hall-style meeting promoting climate change legislation on Thursday,
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) predicted there will be “an ice-free Arctic”
in "five or 10 years."

“The arctic ice is disappearing faster
than was predicted,” Kerry said. “And instead of waiting until 2030 or
whenever it was to have an ice-free Arctic, we’re going to have one in
five or 10 years.” ...

“Every single area of the science,
where predictions have been made, is coming back faster – worse than was
predicted,” Kerry said. “The levels of carbon dioxide that are going
into the ocean is higher. The acidity is higher. It’s damaging the
ecosystem of the oceans.”

“You know, all of our marine
crustaceans that depend on the formation of their shells -- that acidity
undoes that,” he said. “Coral reefs – the spawning grounds for fish.
Run that one down and you’ll see the dangers.

Kerry further
said: “Predictions of sea level rise are now 3 to 6 feet. They’re higher
than were originally going to be predicted over the course of this
century because nothing’s happening. But the causes and effects are
cumulative.”

“The Audubon Society [not exactly, you know, an
ideological entity on the right or the left or wherever in America] has
reported that its members are reporting a hundred-mile swath in the
United States of America where plants, shrubs, trees, flowers – things
that used to grow -- don’t grow any more,” Kerry said.

Will a hotter world lead to more intense storms [As Warmists regularly predict]?

2010
might be on track to be the warmest ever (according to GISS), but right
now, we may be about to set a new record of tropical storms — in inactivity.
Ryan Maue tracks the global accumulated activity and reports that by
the end of July we might break the record low we set last year.

Ryan
N. Maue’s 2010 Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Update: "July 15: If
no additional ACE occurred in July, the 24-month global ACE total would
be 1095 compared to last month at 1173. The previous 30-year low was
1091 set recently in September 2009. No lower values exist during the
past 30-years.

Global and Northern Hemsiphere Tropical Cyclone Activity is near a record low

Looking
at the National Hurricane Centre, it doesn’t seem like there is much
activity on the way between now and the end of July.

Advisories
issued for the North Atlantic, The East Pacific, The West Pacific, and
the Indian Ocean are all the same: There is no tropical storm activity
for this region.

Observed Climate Change and the Negligible Global Effect of Greenhouse-gas Emission Limits in the State of Texas

Summary for Policy Makers

Variations
in climate from year to year and decade to decade play a greater role
in the Texan climate than any long-term trends. Short-term variability
will continue to dominate the climate in future. The Texas climate shows
no statically significant long-term trend in mean annual temperature,
rainfall, floods, droughts, heatwaves, tornadoes, or hurricanes – still
less any trend that could reasonably be attributed to “global warming”.

Agricultural
yields in Texas will continue to increase. Record crop yields will
continue to be set every couple of years. The climate is not the driving
reason for the improvement: but it has not prevented it in the past and
will not prevent it in the future.

The climate has little
impact on the health of Texas’ population. Public health measures aimed
at combating the health impacts of heat waves and vector-borne diseases
are more cost-effective than the many expensive and largely untested
proposals for mitigating “global warming”

Overwhelmingly,
observational scientific evidence demonstrates that “global warming”
does not have and will not have any appreciable impact on the climate of
Texas. A cessation of all of Texas’s CO2 emissions would result in a
climatically-irrelevant global temperature reduction by the year 2100 of
less than two hundredths of a degree Celsius. A complete cessation of
all anthropogenic emissions from Texas will result in a global sea-level
rise savings by the year 2100 of an estimated 0.32 cm, or just over
one-tenth of an inch.

Again, this value is climatically
irrelevant Even if the entire Western world were to close down its
economies completely and revert to the Stone Age, without even the
ability to light fires, the growth in emissions from China and India
would replace our entire emissions in little more than a decade. In this
context, any cuts in emissions from Texas would be extravagantly
pointless.

Their
new "pay to view" regime could be making them desperate to get new
classes of readers. But it might lose them readers too. I just read
the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail these days and feel no loss at
all

To the colourful Daily Telegraph blogger James
Delingpole, it was winner of the coveted award for the "Biggest front
page non-story in history of journalism". What he was referring to was a
tale published a week ago under the by-line of The Times's enviromment
correspondent Ben Webster which led the paper, covering virtually the
entire front-page and with a whole further page inside, beneath the huge
headline "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics."

Everything
about this story was bizarre. Its essence, based on information which
as Webster told us was had been supplied by Bob Ward, policy director of
the Grantham Institute on Climate Change, was that Exxon Mobil, the
world's largest oil company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four
US think-tanks.

These hired lackeys had then shamefully gone on
to describe the various official inquiries into the Climategate emails
scandal as "whitewashes", apparently citing them as evidence that the
dangers of global warming had been "grossly exaggerated".

The
story concluded by suggesting that Exxon Mobil had clearly corrupted
these four venal think tanks into giving "the oil company at least
another year of freedom to reap the profits of its high-carbon
strategy".

The most obvious puzzle was why this remarkably
tenuous tale should have been put by The Times on its front page,
presumably rating it as the most important news of the day. The evidence
assembled by Mr Ward, who had apparently "been monitoring Exxon's links
to sceptic groups," hardly seemed to stack up even in its own terms.

One
think-tank had apparently received $50,000 last year, another had also
received $50,000 - but how all this added up to "almost £1 million" in
the past 12 months was far from clear. Furthermore, none of these
think-tanks had really been anything but bit-players in the great
ongoing row over Climategate.

Not one of the knowledgable
sceptics who have torn those reports apart in detail, led by Steve
McIntyre on Climate Audit, has ever received a cent of funding from "Big
Oil". And what makes all this particularly laughable is that the
penny-packets given to think-tanks which were almost wholly irrelevant
to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into all
the groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.

Even
the big oil companies have long since been putting their real money
into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low
carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University
to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP,
which famously rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave
$500 million to fund similar research.

In fact two things made
The Times's grotesque overblowing of this story rather much more
interesting than many Times readers might have guessed. The first was
the fact that the origin of the story was Bob Ward, who has in recent
years become familiar to followers of the climate debate as a tireless
advocate in the media for warmist alarmism.

Looking raather like a
night-club bouncer, though not so polite, Mr Ward seems to have set
himself up as a professional attack dog for the cause, harrying anyone
who dares publicly to promote scepticism by any means he can find.

He
used to work in this capacity for the fanatically warmist Royal
Society, in which role, in 2007, he organised a voluminous series of
complaints to the regulatory body Ofcom, signed by "37 professors",
against Channel 4's documentary The Global Warming Swindle. A year
later, after wasting huge quantities of everyone's time, Ofcom failed to
uphold any of Ward's complaints.

Since then Mr Ward has been
employed in a similar capacity by the Grantham Institute on Climate
Change at the LSE, where he acts as policy director alongside its
chairman Lord Stern. Formerly Sir Nicholas Stern, this ex-Treasury
official has, since his famous but much derided 700-page report in 2006,
become one of the real high-priests of the warmist religion. And he has
made a fortune from touring the world to advise mankind on how to
reduce its "carbon footprint".

Since he joined the Grantham
Institute, Mr Ward has not only written countless letters to the press
and appeared frequently on TV, he has also launched a number of
similarly time-wasting complaints to the Press Complaints Commission
against articles by climate sceptics such as myself.

Mr Ward's
employer, the Grantham Institute, is backed by significantly big money.
It was set up in two parts, one under Lord Stern at the LSE, the other
run by another committed warmist Sir Brian Hoskins at Imperial College,
funded with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund
billionaire. Its chief purpose is to advise governments, firms and
investment funds on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate
change" - which is now of course one of the fastest-growing and most
lucrative industries in the world....

How The Times's front-page
headline might rather more relevantly have been re-worded was
"Governments, foundations, multi-national corporations including the
owners of this newspaper and Big Oil give hundreds of billions of pounds
to promote worldwide climate bonanza." But doubtless The Times's
editors would have ruled that this was too long for their front page.

Another Green soul declares enough is enough. It’s a question of conscience

Physicist
Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science
researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has
officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. He runs a
radio show, and speaks with many activists and NGO’s around the world.
He claims that the “activists in the developing world, who need to
directly defend their own neighborhoods, they understand that this
global warming thing is an invention.”

Climate Depot has released
a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a
“corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social
phenomenon as anything else” .

“I argue that by far
the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and
profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might;
and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to
hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any
justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been
co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Rancourt is scathing of universities (and rightly so):

“They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not
truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that
keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make
docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other
intellectuals,” Rancourt said.

“You have this army of
university scientists and they have to pretend like they are doing
important research without ever criticizing the powerful interests in a
real way. So what do they look for, they look for elusive sanitized
things like acid rain, global warming,” he added. This entire process
“helps to neutralize any kind of dissent,” according to Rancourt.

“When you do find something bad, you quickly learn and are told you
better toe the line on this — your career depends on it,” Rancourt said.

Rancourt's article is here Some Big Lies of Science – June 2010

Climate Depot has choice excerpts and a list of other greens who have jumped ship.

In August 2009, the science of global warming was so tenuous that
even activists at green festivals were expressing doubts over man-made
climate fears. “One college professor, confided to me in private
conversation that, ‘I’m not sure climate change is real,’” according to a
report from the New York Green Festival.

The left-wing blog
Huffington Post surprised many by featuring an article on January 3,
2009, by Harold Ambler, demanding an apology from Gore for promoting
unfounded global warming fears.

UK atmospheric scientist
Richard Courtney, a left-of-political center socialist, is another
dissenter of man-made climate fears. Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer
and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant, is a
self-described socialist who also happens to reject man-made climate
fears. Courtney declared in 2008 that there is “no correlation between
the anthropogenic emissions of GHG (greenhouse gases) and global
temperature.”

Alexander Cockburn, a maverick journalist who
leans left on most topics, lambasted the alleged global-warming
consensus on the political Web site CounterPunch.org, arguing that
there’s no evidence yet that humans are causing the rise in global
temperature. After publicly speaking to reject man-made warming fears,
Cockburn wrote on February 22, 2008 “I have been treated as if I have
committed intellectual blasphemy.”

Former Greenpeace member
and Finnish scientist Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a lecturer of environmental
technology and a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland
who has authored 200 scientific publications..

Life-long
liberal Democrat Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with
a PhD in physical chemistry, also declared his dissent of warming fears
in 2008….

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK
environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University, and host
of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, converted from believer to a
skeptic about global warming.

Warmists may be winning the big grants, but they're not winning the argument, says Christopher Booker

Ever
more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global
warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was
given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique
they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather
event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported
that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and
longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF,
the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as
evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate
abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what
might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.

Meanwhile,
notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which
has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the
Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent's coldest winter for years.

In
America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has
been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide
temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest
ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science
blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely
concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather
stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a
startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at
all.

A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep
their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official
inquiries into the "Climategate" scandal have cleared the top IPCC
scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been
"vindicated". But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve
McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the
inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself,
who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic
Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

The perfunctory
report of the Science Appraisal Panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, examined
only 11 papers produced by the CRU, none of them remotely connected to
what the fuss was all about. Last week Andrew Montford, author of The
Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science,
revealed on his blog (Bishop Hill – bishophill.squarespace.com) that the
choice of these papers was approved for the inquiry by Sir Brian
Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial
College, and by Phil Jones, the CRU's former director – an appraisal of
whose work was meant to be the purpose of the inquiry.

A third
technique, most familiar of all, has been to fall back on the dog-eared
claim that leading sceptics only question warmist orthodoxy because they
have been funded by "Big Oil" and the "fossil fuel industry".
Particularly bizarre was a story last week covering the front page and
an inside page of one newspaper, headed "Oil giant gives £1 million to
fund climate sceptics".

The essence of this tale was that Exxon
Mobil, the oil giant that is the world's third biggest company, last
year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks. These had gone on
to dismiss the Climategate inquiries as "whitewashes".

It was
hardly necessary to be given money by Exxon to see what was dubious
about those inquiries. Not one of the knowledgeable sceptics who have
torn them apart has received a cent from Big Oil. But what made this
particularly laughable was that the penny-packets given to think-tanks
that have been largely irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by
the colossal sums poured into the army of groups and organisations on
the other side of the argument.

Even the big oil companies have
long been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing
how they are in favour of a "low-carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave
$100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources
needed to fight global warming. BP, which rebranded itself in 2004 as
"Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

The
Grantham Institute provides another example. It was set up at the LSE
and Imperial College with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an
investment fund billionaire, to advise governments and firms on how to
promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change", now one of the
fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses in the world.

Compare
the funding received by a handful of think-tanks to the hundreds of
billions of dollars lavished on those who speak for the other side by
governments, foundations, multinational corporations, even Big Oil, and
the warmists are winning hands down. But only financially: they are not
winning the argument.

Last
winter, when the Northeast was buried under record snowfalls, some
political activists had a little fun at the expense of global-warming
alarmists by quipping that it was going to keep snowing until Al Gore
said “uncle.” Those who peddle environmental hysteria denounced this
argument, which was obviously tongue-in-cheek, as the sort of
know-nothing idiocy that you can expect from all those who refuse to
accept the true religion of global warming.

Flash forward to
what is proving a hot summer in the Northeast and, amazingly, we find
the New York Times’s economic columnist Dave Leonhardt using the same
sort of logic as that of the pranksters who built an igloo on Capitol
Hill last February and dubbed it Al Gore’s new home. The only difference
is that the Grey Lady’s economic wise man is putting forward his case
without irony or apology.

The lede of Leonhardt’s column on
Tuesday used the current heat wave as the opener for his complaint
against members of Congress who refuse to pass President Obama’s energy
bill, which would inaugurate a system of massive tax increases on
business under the guise of a “cap-and-trade” system that would
supposedly decrease carbon usage. Increasing numbers of Americans are
skeptical about the theories that assume human responsibility for any
climate change, in part because the Climategate scandal showed the lack
of integrity on the part of the scientists who have hyped alarmist
scenarios rather than sober science. But Leonhardt repeats, again
without irony, the talk about the Himalayan Glaciers melting, without
noting that his own newspaper reported that the much-ballyhooed
assertion that the glaciers would melt by 2030 was a fraud based on
bogus science.

Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme won’t pass, despite
the laments of both Leonhardt and his fellow Times-man Tom Friedman,
largely because most Americans are appalled at the idea of such a
massive power grab by the government and know that imposing these sort
of punitive taxes at a time of deep recession is a prescription for an
economic disaster.

But the point here is that Leonhardt’s effort
to whip up support for global-warming legislation because of a heat wave
in the middle of summer is as silly as anyone who claimed that the fact
that it snowed in the winter meant the opposite about global warming.

The
problem with global-warming science is the manipulation of data to
prove a preordained conclusion, such as the now discredited “hockey
stick” diagram, which “proved” global warming. Leonhardt’s arguments in
favor of his statist solutions to the possibility of climate change are
weak. But his attempt, based on the current temperature spikes, to shame
members of Congress who wisely want no part of this fiscal catastrophe
in the making shows a lack of intellectual integrity that strips his
advocacy of any credibility.

IS
IT just me? A report says that nasty global warming is to blame for. . .
wait for it. . . making yellow-bellied marmots bigger. Seeing as
these critters live in America, I'm surprised it's not all BP's fault.

According
to Dr Arpat Ozgul, a biologist at London's Imperial College, the wee
furry beasts are larger because extra hot weather means they've more
time to grow.

That's all very well, except I remember that, only
last year, we were warned that Scottish sheep on remote St Kilda were
getting smaller. Because of global warming.

In a report written by... good grief... Dr Arpat Ozgul of Imperial College, London!

Hmmm.
It makes you wonder what other catastrophes global warming is
unleashing. Are baboons' bottoms going redder? Maybe polar bears are
getting BO?

This bloke appears to have had a couple of holidays
and returned with the earth-shattering news that a rodent with big teeth
has gone up a dress size and lamb chops on uninhabited islands don't go
as far these days.

And what happens if temperatures keep rising?
New York will be stalked by 100ft-tall marmot-zillas, swatting fighter
jets out of the sky and picking their teeth with oak trees. While here
in Scotland we'll be keeping flocks of sheep in matchboxes.

But this is the power of the white coat isn't it? Put one on and folk will believe any old guff.

This
week, we've been warned that beach umbrellas won't keep you safe from
the sun. Rogue rays supposedly ricochet off the sand which means you
could still get slightly burnt over the space of many long hours. So do
take care, folks, if you're thinking of sunbathing well into the night.

Meanwhile,
a "supercomputer" shared by Warwick and Sheffield Universities has
spent months reaching the stunning conclusion that eggs come from
chickens. Fancy that!

But the real astonishing scientific
achievement here is how these geeks have managed the impossible...
alchemy in reverse. They have taken heaps of taxpayers' gold and
magically transformed it into a bucket of pish.

Here's the point:
We haven't two farthings to rub together. So the "science" community
could perhaps stop moaning about proposed cuts to their £4BILLION annual
budget.

Maybe, until the nation gets back on its feet, they
could go easy on weighing chipmunks, measuring sheep or lounging about
on beaches trying to get sunburnt very slowly.

When we finally
emerge from the wreckage of this recession, we can all get back to
normal. Us lot can go back to work to pay tax. And scientists can
spend it checking if beagles smoke faster while playing online poker.

That is, of course, unless the world has been overrun by sun-crazed mega-squirrels.

You
can get anything you like out of a climate model. It is just a
patchwork of guesses and leaves out lots of influential factors. Just
alter one assumption (e.g. the effect of clouds) and the answers can
change dramatically

According a new computer model, a total
of nearly seven million additional Mexicans could emigrate to the U.S.
by 2080 as a result of reduced crop yields brought about by a hotter,
drier climate—assuming other factors influencing immigration remain
unchanged.

"The model shows that climate-driven refugees could be
a big deal in the future," said study co-author Michael Oppenheimer, an
atmospheric scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Using
data on Mexican emigration as well as climate and crop yields in 30
Mexican states between 1995 and 2005, Oppenheimer and colleagues created
the computer model to predict the effect of climate change on the rate
of people crossing the border.

In that ten-year period, 2 percent of the Mexican population emigrated to the U.S. for every 10 percent reduction in crop yield.

Using
the model to extrapolate this real-world figure over the next 70 years,
the researchers calculated that 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans—a
number roughly equal to 10 percent of Mexico's current adult
population—could migrate to the U.S. by 2080.

The research is one
of the first attempts by scientists to put hard numbers on how climate
change can affect human migration patterns.

"Our study is the
first to build a model that can be used for projecting the effects on
migration of future climate change," Oppenheimer said.

Global Warming Study "a Simplification"

Though
the new global warming study is "original and very interesting," it
shouldn't be interpreted as a forecast of what will happen, economist
Ian Goldin, who wasn't involved in the project, said via email.

"The
[end of the] time range—2080—is a very long time off, and there are
many other factors [besides climate change] which may lead to a very
different outcome," said Goldin, director of the University of Oxford's
James Martin 21st Century School.

Barry Smit, a climate-impact scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, agreed.

"I
wouldn't take these numbers to the bank," said Smit, who also wasn't
involved in the research, which is published in this week's issue of the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To
reach their conclusions, the authors had to make some "heroic
assumptions," Smit said, such as that the current economic and political
situations of the U.S. and Mexico won't change for decades.

Study
co-author Oppenheimer acknowledged there are many uncertainties in his
team's model. But it's important for scientists to investigate climate
change-induced migration quantitatively, he said.

"This is the
first time anybody's built a model to do this," Oppenheimer said. "It's a
simplification, and there are a lot of assumptions, but it's the start
of a learning process. As we learn more, the model will improve, and the
numbers will get more reliable."

…you see something like this piece in the Huffington Post and you lose all your optimism.

It’s
an article about a group of left-wing propagandists hard at work in the
public schools in Orleans Parish who are using the middle-schoolers in
their charge as fodder to spread sheer insanity. And of course, the
adults responsible for managing those schools think it’s actually a good
idea.

But when these 12- to 14-year-old judges
delivered their verdict, the party they held chiefly responsible was the
American people. And as members of a student-based school reform group
called the Rethinkers, these young people now have a recommendation for
New Orleans schools: Move toward becoming oil-free by 2015, the tenth
anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“If we want to prevent
another oil spill, we need to start weaning ourselves off this product
and begin searching for new ideas,” says ninth-grader Danny Do, whose
father is a shrimper. “Now is the perfect time to get moving, and
schools are a great place to start!”

This may sound about as
plausible as “the dog ate my homework,” and the Rethinkers acknowledge
that their vision is an ambitious one. But they have both the track
record and the supporters to suggest that they are not a bunch of naïve
kids who can be easily dismissed.

The press conference they
held last week to announce this and other recommendations for school
reform in New Orleans attracted The Times-Picayune, ABC News, and other
media outlets as well as community and education leaders–notably, Paul
Vallas, whose work as CEO of Chicago Public Schools was praised by
President Clinton and is now superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery
School District, which is focused on transforming underperforming
schools into successful ones.

“Paul is obsessed with the
Rethinkers and wants Rethinkers clubs in all schools,” says Siona
LaFrance, Vallas’s chief of staff. “He likes that the kids are thinking
and challenging authority, and that all of their suggestions are based
on a lot of consideration. And he likes that this is a continuing
effort.”

The article goes on to describe a withering
array of psychobabble and lunacy being foisted on Orleans school kids by
these “Rethinkers,” including a campaign to do away with sporks in
school cafeterias, replacing metal detectors with “mood detectors,”
namely, student hall monitors who assess kids as they come to school to
see if they’re dangerous and getting more toilet paper into schools (as
though kids can’t come up with all kinds of uses for toilet paper beyond
what schools buy it for).

There’s even a quote from the founder of this movement which might cause an aneurism among our more susceptible readers…

“I say to the kids, ‘You live in a country where people don’t
respect kids. If we’re trying to give dignity to your voice, we have to
give you something to talk about where you are the stone-cold expert.
There is no one on Earth who can say you’re not an expert on schools.’”

So
it’s hardly a surprise when one of these child abusers, who learned her
craft at Middlebury College in Vermont and describes herself as a
“community organizer,” decides to leverage the oil spill into an assault
on the industry in South Louisiana which offers perhaps the most
lucrative employment opportunities available to kids in Orleans schools.
Meet Mallory Falk…

“We know “oil-free schools”
sounds easy to dismiss because it’s such a big vision,” notes Mallory
Falk, a recent Middlebury College graduate and community organizer who
came to New Orleans to work with the Rethinkers. “That is why our focus
over the coming year is to come up with realistic, practical ways for
schools to move toward being oil-free.”

This year, for
example, they have offered four simple suggestions: Start measuring
energy waste (including air conditioners set too high and lights left on
unnecessarily), form student green teams to identify ways to reduce
waste and convince other kids to get with the program, eliminate the use
of incandescent light bulbs, and recycle.

A simple
beginning, but stay tuned. The Rethinkers plan to meet throughout the
new school year to develop more specifics. And they have already
received a grant from the U.S. Green Building Council to film a
documentary about their experience.

It’s bad enough that
these people are sinking their hooks into school kids in the first
place. What’s worse – unforgiveably so – is that the brains they’re
poisoning with the ridiculous and poisonous ideas they’re pushing are
Orleans public school kids. These are overwhelmingly at-risk students;
Orleans is beginning to see a renaissance in education thanks to the
advent of school choice and competition since Katrina, but dropout rates
are still high and test scores are still low. And Orleans public school
kids are still very economically disadvantaged, still in desperate need
of marketable skills and still disproportionately lacking in strong
parental guidance.

In other words, while it would be bad enough
if kids in Montgomery County, Maryland or Beverly Hills were subjected
to left-wing pablum like the Rethinkers push, they’re doing this to some
of the most vulnerable children in America.

These kids are 12,
13 and 14 years old. Before attempting to turn them into
environmentalist freaks, has this cabal insured that they read at grade
level? Can they certify their charges in basic math? Can these kids find
Omaha on a map? Do they know the difference between a federalist and an
anti-federalist?

This
is a bit too speculative to hang your hat on but the evidence that
early humans survived an ice age only in Southern South Africa is at
least interesting.

Southern South Africa is quite close to the
Antarctic so should, on simplistic assumptions, have been at least as
deadly an environment as icecapped Europe and North Africa.

On
the other hand, the Warmists have never been able to show warming in the
Southern hemisphere of our day so it is not entirely surprising that
climate change was not symmetrical between the hemispheres in the past:
Maybe it has never been "global".

The Southern hemisphere has a lot more ocean so that could be a moderating influence. Go South, young man!

A
STRIP of land on Africa's southern coast became a last refuge for the
band of early humans who survived an ice age that wiped out the species
elsewhere, scientists maintain.

The land, referred to by
researchers as "the garden of Eden," may have been the only part of
Africa to remain continuously habitable during the ice age that began
about 195,000 years ago.

Scientists' excavations showed how a
combination of rich vegetation on land and nutrient-laden currents in
the sea created a source of food that could sustain early humans through
devastating climate changes.

"Shortly after Homo sapiens first
evolved, the harsh climate conditions nearly extinguished our species,"
said Professor Curtis Marean, of the Institute of Human Origins at
Arizona State University.

"Recent finds suggest the small
population that gave rise to all humans alive today survived by
exploiting a unique combination of resources along the southern coast of
Africa."

The idea that early humans were once reduced to a tiny
remnant population arose from research showing that modern humans have
far less genetic diversity than most other species. Some scientists
suggested the human population could have fallen to as low as a few
hundred individuals during this period, while others insisted the
evidence to support this theory remains weak.

During his study,
Prof Marean discovered that the isolated caves around an area known as
Pinnacle Point, South Africa, 386 kilometres east of Cape Town, were
rich in ancient human artifacts.

In a soon to be published paper,
Prof Marean and his colleagues argued the caves contain archaeological
remains going back at least 164,000 years - and possibly even further
back. The remains also showed that, despite the hardships suffered by
early humans in other places, the inhabitants of Pinnacle Point were
living in a land of plenty.

It's
pure "ad hominem" propaganda with not even a mention of any of the
factual issues involved. It's all about "trust" according to her.
Slightly pathetic, actually. Maybe she needs a father figure.

Her
invocation of "The Science" (without saying what it is) is standard
fare from politicians and thus tends to show what Jo Abbess is.

Skeptics do things like pointing out the lack of correspondence between
tree-ring "measures" of temperature and what actual thermometers say.
THAT is science -- but you get none of that from Ms Abbess below.

And her claim that what Phil Jones does is "rigorous" is the funniest bit of all.

She has however so far allowed comments on her blog that contradict her.

Glad
to see Professor Phil Jones is back at work and enrolling students for
the autumn on the Climate Change MSc postgraduate degree programme at
the University of East Anglia (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) :-

http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/courses/msc-climate-change

This
course would probably be useful for a number of mainstream media
journalists to follow. Even if they don’t have an appropriate background
in Physics, Chemistry, Geography, Environmental studies or similar, it
could be of benefit to ameliorate their world view.

They could
learn something from the lectures and coursework – that the Science of
Climate Change is a serious and rigorous endeavour – unlike the
apparently lax behaviour of their own profession over the last year or
so.

Investigative journalism without the “investigation” part
appears to be a mishmash of unverifiable facts and unfounded opinions.
You need to know who is credible at the very least, and you can’t get
that from following the vindictive views of public contrarians.

If
you want to understand Climate Change, you need to study the Science,
not just read denier-sceptic web logs or talk to Steve McIntyre, Benny
Peiser, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts, Doug Keenan, Nigel Lawson or
Christopher Monckton, and think that you have thereby become
sufficiently informed.

An Australian professor of political science
says the Warmists were proven right by the various sham "Inquiries" so
far launched into their notorious actions

The pathetic
peroration below was published in a Left-leaning Australian daily. Note
that, as usual, it is all "ad hominem", which again shows what
pathetic souls Warmists are: just clinging to one-another for support.

No interest in "The science" is apparent below, of course --
such as the fact that the "decline" (in 20th century temperatures as
measured by tree rings) hidden by Phil Jones & Co. completely
invalidates the measures of past temperatures that Warmists have always
relied upon.

But I suppose it is a big ask to expect an expert in in political science to know any real science

The author below is Rodney Tiffen. Tiffin is a light meal. A very light meal in this case, I would suggest

Chances
are, you have not heard much about Climategate lately, but last
November it dominated the media. Three weeks before the Copenhagen
summit, thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the
University of East Anglia were published on a Russian website.

The
research institute was a leading contributor to the fourth
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and some of the leaked
emails showed the scientists in a poor light.

The scandal was
one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change.
What seemed close to a bipartisan agreement on an environmental trading
scheme collapsed with Tony Abbott's defeat of Malcolm Turnbull. Within
months the Rudd government lost its nerve on what the former prime
minister called "the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time".

By
casting doubt on the integrity of the scientists, Climategate helped
puncture public faith in the science, and probably contributed to
Labor's political panic. The echo chamber of columnists reverberated
with angry and accusatory claims. In Australia, Piers Akerman said: "The
tsunami of leaked emails . . . reveal a culture of fraud, manipulation,
deceit and personal vindictiveness to rival anything in a John le Carre
or John Grisham thriller." Later he wrote: "The crowd that gathered in
Copenhagen were there pushing a fraud."

Andrew Bolt thought that
"what they reveal is perhaps the greatest scientific scandal" of our
time. "Emails leaked on the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to
deceive the world - and Mr Rudd has fallen for it."

Miranda
Devine wrote: "We see clearly the rotten heart of the propaganda machine
that has driven the world to the brink of insanity."

The
ramifications of Climategate were immediate. The climate unit's head,
Professor Phil Jones, was forced to stand down. Three inquiries were set
up to examine the scientists' conduct.

The first, a British
House of Commons select committee, reported in March that the scientific
reputation of Professor Jones and the CRU remained intact. The second, a
science assessment panel, set up with the Royal Society and consisting
of eminent British researchers, reported in April.

Its chairman,
Lord Oxburgh, said his team found "absolutely no evidence of any
impropriety whatsoever" and that "whatever was said in the emails, the
basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly".

The
third, set up by the university itself, published its 160-page report
two weeks ago. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of
the CRU scientists, "we find that the rigour and honesty [of the
scientists] as scientists are not in doubt". Importantly, it concluded:
"We did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the
conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

In other words, nothing in
the emails undermined the research of the climate scientists. Like the
other two, the inquiry found aspects of the scientists' behaviour that
fell short of professional standards - "failing to display the proper
degree of openness".

What might seem the most damning was the way
Jones dealt with freedom of information requests, but context makes his
behaviour more understandable. In July last year alone, the CRU
received 60 FoI requests. Answering them would have been too much for
even all the unit's staff time. In a matter of days, it received 40
similar FoI requests, each wanting data from five different countries -
200 requests in all. Jones concluded the unit was subject to a vexatious
campaign.

While not fully excusing their behaviour, one has to
appreciate the embattled position of scientists who received a steady
stream of obscene and abusive emails and constant public attacks on
their integrity.

After the leaks, Jones, now reinstated, received death threats and said he had contemplated suicide.

You
might imagine the media would be keen to report on authoritative
conclusions about allegations it had found so newsworthy in December.
But coverage of each of the reports has been non-existent in many news
organisations and in others brief or without prominence.

At best,
the coverage of the inquiries' conclusions added up to a 20th of the
coverage the original allegations received, which leaves us to ponder
the curiosities of a news media that gets so over-excited by dramatic
allegations and then remains so incurably uninterested in their
resolution.

The newspapers that gave greatest play to the
allegations tended to give less attention to the findings. The
columnists who gave greatest vent to their indignation have not made any
revisions or corrections, let alone apologised to the scientists whose
integrity they so sweepingly impugned.

Even at the time, it was
clear much of the coverage was more attuned to maximising sensation
rather than to reporting with precision. The sheer number of leaked
emails, for instance, was sometimes taken as proof of the scale of the
scandal, as if they were all disreputable. In fact, only from a handful
could anything sinister be conjured.

It is a common criticism of
the media that it prominently publishes allegations, but gives less
coverage to the prosaic facts that later refute them. But rarely is the
disproportion so stark. Rarely has such an edifice of sweeping
accusation and extravagant invective been constructed on such a slender
factual basis. Rarely does it do such damage.

Pennsylvania
State University recently released a report summarizing its final
“investigation” into whether one of its employees had committed
scientific misconduct. The report exonerated Dr. Michael Mann of all
charges, although he did receive a tap on the wrist – for sharing
unpublished manuscripts with third parties without first getting the
authors’ permission!

The result was hardly unexpected. Most
experts who question climate disaster claims had assumed Penn State
would produce a whitewash. PSU stood to lose significantly in reputation
and dollars if it found that Dr. Mann had cheated on research and
engaged in other conduct unbecoming of a university professor. What was
surprising is the reason it gave for its “not guilty” finding.

Dr.
Mann could not possibly be guilty, the report averred, because his
“level of success in proposing research and obtaining funding” was
possible only because he had “met or exceeded the highest standards of
his profession.” Indeed, his research was consistently “judged to be
outstanding by his peers.”

Mann’s innocence was further proven,
said Penn State, by the awards and recognition he has received. For
example, his “hockey stick” temperature graph for the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change played a significant role in
the IPCC receiving the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Had his “conduct been
outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible
for him to receive so many awards and recognitions,” the report argued.

Such
a circular tautology would earn an “F” in introductory college
reasoning courses. It is eerily similar to views taken by starry-eyed
investors and SEC officials before they realized Bernie had Madoff with
billions in client money. The Penn State report is akin to what Mrs.
Madoff might issue following her “investigation” of his conduct,
“investment” strategies, “standards,” accolades and awards.

Dr.
Mann and many of his “peers” were implicated in the Climategate
scandals, obstruction of legitimate FOIA requests via deletion of
emails, manipulation of global warming temperature data and research,
and the politicized funding system that kept them and their institutions
awash in government/taxpayer dollars. They conferred awards and
recognition on each other, excluded skeptical scientists from “peer
reviews” of one another’s papers, and conspired to blackball editors who
permitted the publication of professional papers by Sallie Baliunas,
Willie Soon, Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer and other
climate experts whose work challenged the Mann-made global warming
disaster thesis.

In so doing, Mann and his colleagues promoted
laws, treaties and regulatory schemes that imposed higher prices and
greater government/activist control over energy use, economic growth,
and virtually everything modern societies eat, drive, make, ship and do.
They, their institutions, and a host of politicians, bureaucrats,
bankers and corporate executives thus had a direct stake in the science,
politics and “renewable energy future” supported by billions of dollars
in annual research grants – and in ensuring that no investigation upset
this convenient golden apple cart.

It is these “accepted
practices” and “highest standards of the profession” that are being
protected here. It is for this reason that the “investigation” was
conducted solely by Penn State – which permitted no contradictory
evidence, no adverse witnesses, and no cross-examination of Dr. Mann or
anyone else knowledgeable about his research, funding and alleged
misconduct.

Penn State’s Tom Sawyeresque report says far more
than the university could possibly have intended about the “highest
standards” prevailing today in climate research, and the way
universities circle the wagons and protect their “rainmakers,” while
throwing “manmade climate disaster” skeptics under the bus or shipping
them off to academic Siberia.

One could accurately (and sadly)
say there is nothing new under the sun. A 1988 NOVA program on PBS
investigated the causes and extent of cheating in academia. “Do
Scientists Cheat?” interviewed several scientists who discussed how easy
and tempting it was to lie and falsify research. Indeed, observed JAMA
senior Editor Bruce Dan, while peer review “is a wonderful process for
throwing out garbage, I can’t see that [it] can detect fraud, except in a
few lucky chances.”

The show focused on two high-profile cases –
John Darcy and Robert A. Slutsky, convicted perpetrators of scientific
misconduct. Both researchers were well-funded, had numerous
publications, won prestigious awards, and were on the fast-track to
academic stardom. Both were brought down when other scientists suspected
fraud in their work. Investigators concluded that most of their papers
were either questionable or demonstrably fraudulent. Many of their
co-authors were implicated and their reputations tarnished.

Ironically,
one of the NOVA interviewees was Professor Rustum Roy, head of the
Materials Research Lab at – Penn State University. He said cheating
often occurs because researchers are under intense pressure to publish,
win awards, and raise more money each year just to keep their labs
going, employ research assistants and provide their academic
institutions with 40-50% of each grant for “overhead.” Hard cheating,
Roy explained, occurred when a scientist concludes he can get away with
compromising or cutting corners a little bit, so why not take it a step
further?

Thus, those who have big research fiefdoms, are prolific
publishers and win many awards have the most to gain by misconduct.
They are also most likely to get away with it, partly because of their
reputation –and partly because academia has too many incentives to look
the other way and avoid taking actions that could bring disrepute on the
university and cut off the financial gravy train.

This
translates into a high degree of moral apathy toward scientific
misconduct, the PBS program argued. Academics are much less outraged
than one might expect, even when confronted by obvious fraud. This, of
course, undermines the integrity of science, and the ethics of its
practitioners.

Perhaps more importantly, the program demonstrated
that whistle-blowers who exposed fraud were more likely to be the
target of investigations than the alleged perpetrators. This sends a
chilling message to anyone who might raise academic misconduct
questions, and further insulates guilty parties.

The NOVA program
also included excerpts from a House Committee on Oversight and
Investigations hearing on academic misconduct. “Unfortunately, few
universities, when confronted with the task of investigating misconduct,
have conducted as thorough or candid a self-appraisal” as they should
have, Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI) noted.

In fact, universities
that conduct investigations of their own scientists were like the “fox
actively investigating the chicken coop. The university gets first crack
at the data and witnesses, and gets to frame the issues…. There is a
natural tendency to limit the damage.”

The program ends with the question: “Does the scientific community really want to expose misconduct?”

Unfortunately,
the answer seems to be, No. Worse, over the last 20 years, the problem
has only gotten worse, while the stakes have become infinitely higher.

The bogus science is used to
justify energy and environmental policies, laws, treaties, court
decisions and subsidies that will enrich some, bankrupt others, control
our lives, and send millions of jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the
investigation by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is heatedly
denounced by the very academics and institutions that refuse to conduct
honest investigations of their own.

And you thought Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll and Jonathon Swift had good material to work with!?!

A
recent bit of news from Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) suggests
that James Lovelock, the scientist behind the Gaia theory of Earth and
its life systems, might have a point when he criticises most renewable
energy sources as inefficient at best and foolish at worst.

In
its latest interim management statement, issued this week, SSE reported
that “weather conditions” during April, May and June contributed to a
full 30 per cent drop in electricity output from its wind farms,
hydroelectric facilities and Slough biomass heat and power plant. Output
from those sources fell to 700 gigawatt-hours during that period,
compared to the 1,000 gigawatt-hours generated during the last quarter
of 2009.

While SSE didn’t elaborate on those “weather
conditions,” one factor certainly had to be the fact that the first half
of 2010 saw the “driest first six months of the year for 100 years,”
according to the UK’s Met Office. And, as the climate continues
changing, Britain can expect that type of situation to become more
common, the agency warns.

If hydroelectric power sources are
threatened by climate change, wind energy’s greatest shortcoming is its
great variability, Lovelock warns in his latest book, The Vanishing Face
of Gaia:

“Used sensibly, in locations where the fickle nature of wind is no drawback, it is a valuable local resource, but Europe’s
massive use of wind as a supplement to baseload electricity will
probably be remembered as one of the great follies of the twenty-first
century … ,” he writes.

Lovelock argues the only clean
energy sources that make sense for society are nuclear and solar thermal
energy. All the rest aren’t viable without heavy injections of
government subsidies and green cheerleading, he says.

Lovelock
acknowledges he sometimes takes a bit of hyperbolic licence to make his
points — as when he warned that global warming will lead to a die-off of
billions of humans this century, resulting in only a “few breeding
pairs of people” left in the Arctic. But does he have a point here? Is
the bit of news from SSE a warning sign that we’d be better off by
aggressively developing nuclear and concentrating solar power (such as
that proposed in the Desertec project), and forgetting more intermittent
clean-energy sources?

The Fourth
Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) projected that global sea level will rise by up to 60 cm by 2100
due to global warming. The cause of this rise is twofold: expansion of
ocean waters as they warm and additional water from glaciers melting.
Despite nearly stable sea levels over the past 3,000 years, a number of
low-lying and island nations have seized on the imminent flood as a
reason to demand reparations from developed nations. In reality, most of
the areas in the world that are suffering from inundation are
threatened because of human actions, but not global warming. Damming and
rerouting of rivers combined with over-pumping of ground water has led
to subsidence in many areas—in other words, the seas are not rising, the
land is sinking.

As reported in a review article in Science,
authored by Robert J. Nicholls and Anny Cazenav, global sea levels have
risen throughout the 20th century but key uncertainties remain. Mean sea
level has remained nearly stable since the end of the last
deglaciation. The rate of sea level rise over much of the last 6,000
years has been an almost-imperceptible 1.4 millimeters per year (about 6
inches per century). Based on tide gauge measurements, sea level has
risen by an average of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm/year since 1950. Since the early
1990s, sea level rise (SLR) has been measured by high-precision
altimeter satellites. Between 1993 and 2009, the mean rate of SLR was
reported as 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/year. Naturally, to climate change alarmists,
this suggests that SLR is accelerating because of warming climatic
conditions.

With ~10% of the world population living in
low-elevation coastal zones, figuring out what is truly causing the seas
to rise in some areas is an area worthy of study. In “Sea-Level Rise
and Its Impact on Coastal Zones,” Nicholls and Cazenay sum up the
present state of scientific understanding:

Satellite
altimetry shows that sea level is not rising uniformly. In some regions
(e.g., western Pacific), sea level has risen up to three times faster
than the global mean since 1993. Spatial patterns in sea-level trends
mainly result from nonuniform ocean warming and salinity variations,
although other factors also contribute, including the solid Earth
response to the last deglaciation and gravitational effects and changes
in ocean circulation due to ongoing land ice melting and freshwater
input. Spatial patterns in ocean thermal expansion are not permanent
features: They fluctuate in space and time in response to natural
perturbations of the climate system; as a result, we expect that the
sea-level change patterns will oscillate on multidecadal time scales.
IPCC AR4 projections suggest appreciable regional variability around the
future global mean rise by 2100 in response to nonuniform future ocean
warming, but agreement between the models is poor.

More
plainly said, there are a few wrinkles in the IPCC scenario. First, sea
level is not rising at the same rate everywhere. In fact, in some places
it appears to be falling. This is partly because of the normal action
of plate tectonics, the movement of Earth's crustal plates. This results
in some areas being uplifted, and others forced downward. And, as
glacial ice melts, a great burden is removed from the continental land
mass supporting it. This can cause significant change in relative sea
levels.

“For example, relative sea level is presently falling
where land is uplifting considerably, such as the northern Baltic and
Hudson Bay—the sites of large (kilometer-thick) glaciers during the last
glacial maximum,” state the authors. “In contrast, relative sea level
is rising more rapidly than climate-induced trends on subsiding coasts.”
Fluctuation is also caused by the interaction of wind and ocean, and
changes in the ocean gyres. The nonuniformity of change can be seen in
the map below.

Regional sea-level trends from satellite altimetry.

Other
factors not mentioned when the threat of climate change induced sea
level rise is discussed are non–climate-related anthropogenic processes.
Ground subsidence due to oil and groundwater extraction, or reduced
sediment supply to river deltas caused by dam building, are more
frequently to blame. As stated in the Science review:

In many regions, human activities are exacerbating subsidence on
susceptible coasts, including most river deltas [e.g., the
Ganges-Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Changjiang deltas]. The most dramatic
subsidence effects have been caused by drainage and groundwater fluid
withdrawal; over the 20th century, coasts have subsided by up to 5 m in
Tokyo, 3 m in Shanghai, and 2 m in Bangkok. To avoid submergence and/or
frequent flooding, these cities now all depend on a substantial flood
defense and water management infrastructure. South of Bangkok,
subsidence has led to substantial shoreline retreat of more than 1 km,
leaving telegraph poles standing in the sea.

Sadly, even
after presenting the facts given above, the authors just can't resist
reaching into the scaremonger's bag for some old and discredited
examples of supposed AGW induced sea rise. “Low islands such as the
Maldives or Tuvalu face the real prospect of submergence and complete
abandonment during the 21st century,” the authors fatuously report. This
flies in the face of evidence from sea level expert N. A. Morner, who
has worked extensively in the Maldives and has repeatedly stated that
the local sea level has not changed significantly in decades (see “New
perspectives for the future of the Maldives”). According to Morner et
al.:

Novel prospects for the Maldives do not include a
condemnation to future flooding. The people of the Maldives have, in
the past, survived a higher sea level of about 50–60 cm. The present
trend lack signs of a sea level rise. On the contrary, there is firm
morphological evidence of a significant sea level fall in the last 30
years. This sea level fall is likely to be the effect of increased
evaporation and an intensification of the NE-monsoon over the central
Indian Ocean.

Furthermore, a recent study by Auckland
University geographer Paul Kench has shown that many low-lying Pacific
islands are growing, not sinking. Kench measured 27 islands, where local
sea levels have risen at an average rate of 2mm a year over the past 60
years, and found that just four had diminished in size. The islands of
Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those
which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.

In
what appears to be a significant change of events, Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that he is dropping cap and tax for
now because he does not have enough votes to pass the legislation. Even
an editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal expressed relief that the
nation has been spared of this destructive energy tax that would
accomplish nothing for climate change. Is it that Senator Reid actually
recognizes he does not have the votes? Is it that he is in a tight race
to keep his Senate seat? Or is it something more devious?

Given
the propensity of the leaders of the 111th Congress to develop thousands
of pages of legislation behind closed doors and quickly dump it onto an
unsuspecting public, one must be suspicious. Further, corporations and
special interest groups have spent millions of dollars on mobilizing one
of the greatest lobbing efforts ever. Some, such as Duke Energy and
Exelon, have promised their shareholders that they would get Billions of
US dollars in profits from this lobbing “investment.” The massive
volumes of money that would change hands with cap and tax have attracted
many organizations that demand special government “favors.” They will
not be pleased.

As mentioned in TWTW last week, some commentators
have suggested that after the election a lame duck Congress will pass
some version of cap and tax. The Wall Street Journal suggests that it
may be a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) which would require
utilities to obtain mandatory percentages of their total electricity
from renewable generating sources such as solar and wind. Until
practical electricity storage is commercially available at a reasonable
cost, solar and wind generated electricity is sub-prime energy. Even
with government subsidies, the sub-prime energy market will eventually
implode as did the sub-prime mortgage market that was driven by
government dictates. An implosion of the sub-prime energy market may
have greater destructive economic consequences.

*****************************************

The
peer reviewed paper which is part of the basis for Roy Spencer’s new
book The Great Global Warming Blunder, reviewed in TWTW July 3 and 10,
has been challenged. As all too typical today, the Journal of Climate
did not bother informing Spencer so that he could review the challenge
and respond. According to Spencer, had the Journal done so he could have
corrected some errors and misrepresentations. Spencer points out the
challenge offers some new insights, but the major “issues” were
corrected in a later paper that is in press. (Please see “Can Climate
Feedbacks be Diagnosed from Satellite Data?”)

******************************************

Joe
D’Aleo has discovered that NASA-GISS is playing games with historic
data yet again – call it Creative Enhancement. (Please see his article
under “Challenging the Orthodoxy.”) Also, Anthony Watts has discovered
missing data in NOAA’s latest heat advisory. More stunning is the sudden
cold snap that froze to death thousands of head of cattle in central
Brazil. (Please see articles under “Heat Wave.”)

******************************************

The
BP Oil Spill has been capped, at least for now, but the true cost to
the oil industry in general and the nation as a whole is yet to be
determined. No doubt, many in the US government would like to use it as
an excuse to stop all offshore drilling. The House Energy and Commerce
Committee headed by Rep. Waxman passed legislation that will do exactly
that. (Please see “Blowout Prevention Act”)

To their credit, four
major oil companies are forming a disaster-response system to quickly
shut-off deep water blow-outs in the Gulf of Mexico. It is unknown if
this would be sufficient address the new Waxman anti-drilling bill.
Given the anti-energy attitude in Washington (except for sub-prime
energy), some may suggest that the Department of Justice investigates
the disaster-response system as unlawful collusion under the Sherman
Anti-trust Act.

This
is an unusual book. Parkinson is a distinguished climatologist with a
specialty of polar sea ice and a strong interest in the history and
philosophy of science. She clearly believes that humans are responsible
for past warming and that continued emissions of greenhouse gases will
lead to further warming in the 21st century, yet she is one of the few
AGW supporters who is respectful of contrary opinions. It is interesting
that the Foreword, written by Lonnie Thompson, while praising her book,
faults her for ascribing “nearly equivalent validity to the
contributions of climate skeptics or contrarians.” But Parkinson is
unapologetic and explains her position well throughout the book.

Her
main theme is to argue effectively against the current craze for
“geo-engineering.” I share her view that many of the schemes suggested
lack proper evaluation and are likely to cause more harm than good.
However, I also doubt the necessity for carrying out large-scale
modifications of the global environment since I do not believe that the
human emission of greenhouse gases is causing significant climate
changes.

Full disclosure: About 40 years ago, I was quite
intrigued by the idea of large-scale modifications of the earth’s
environment and included it in discussions in a symposium which I
organized for the AAAS, entitled “Global Effects of Environmental
Pollution.” After publishing a book on this symposium, I worked with the
National Research Council on producing a report on geo-engineering,
which described the various schemes that were then under consideration.
Since this was long before there was any widespread discussion of
greenhouse warming, our report dealt with different topics.

The
Parkinson book has some very attractive features. A well-written
Introduction presents an overview of the Earth System and a descriptive
outline of the book itself. Part I describes very well the history of
climate change since the earth was created 4.6 billion years ago.
There’s also a nice summary of abrupt climate changes.

After this
discussion of natural changes, there’s a short history of past human
impacts and a chapter on the future, with the intriguing title “Why Some
People are So Concerned While Others Aren’t.” While I don’t agree with
everything the author says, I do feel she has given adequate space to
skeptics like Patrick Michaels and Roy Spencer. She also gives much
space to Bjorn Lomborg, who seems to accept the scientific conclusions
of the IPCC, but as an economist/statistician does not accept any of
their recommendations for action. And on this point, I agree most
emphatically.

The 11 retired generals and admirals initially mentioned below seem to
have retired brains too. They reported that global warming will lead
to war -- but failed in their most basic duty as strategic planners –
know your enemy. They accepted the speculation of the IPCC as definitive
intelligence without bothering to test the assumptions. They apparently
did not examine the history of warfare as articulated by historians:
generally, in non-developed areas cooling leads to war (crops fail) and
warming does not

Literally thousands of websites pound home
the idea that global warming is a threat to our national security and
that violent conflicts will result from disruptions caused by climate
change. Many of the websites point to a study released several years ago
by the CNA Corporation which is a nonprofit institution that conducts
in-depth, independent research on complex public interest challenges.
Their study entitled “National Security and the Threat of Climate
Change” was prepared with 11 retired generals and admirals, and it is
widely quoted by those insisting global warming will increase the threat
of war.

The executive summary of the report states “Projected
climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security.
The predicted effects of climate change over the coming decades include
extreme weather events, drought, flooding, sea level rise, retreating
glaciers, habitat shifts, and the increased spread of life-threatening
diseases. These conditions have the potential to disrupt our way of life
and to force changes in the way we keep ourselves safe and secure.”

The
executive summary also states “Climate change acts as a threat
multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the
world. Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already
marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern
nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of
failed states.” And at home they claim “Projected climate change will
add to tensions even in stable regions of the world. The U.S. and Europe
may experience mounting pressure to accept large numbers of immigrant
and refugee populations as drought increases and food production
declines in Latin America and Africa.”

Before you enlist in the
military or start shining up combat boots, there is a recent article in
the journal Climatic Change that might change your mind about global
warming and war. The research was conducted by Richard Tol and Sebastian
Wagner from The Netherlands and Germany, respectively. The last
sentence of their abstract caught our attention as they conclude “it
appears that global warming would not lead to an increase in violent
conflict” in mid-latitude locations such as China or Europe. We don’t
see this study getting a lot of press coverage, so we decided to feature
it on World Climate Report – just as we did an earlier study which
contradicted the global warming=more war claims.

Tol and Wagner
begin noting “In the gloomier scenarios of climate change, violent
conflict plays a key part. War would break out over declining water
resources, and millions of refugees would cause mayhem. The Nobel Peace
Prize of 2007 was partly awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore for their
contribution to slowing climate change and thus preventing war.
Scenarios of climate-change-induced violence can be painted with
abandon, because there is in fact very little research to either support
or refute such claims.”

Are these two doubting Al Gore by
suggesting there is little research to support any claim that global
warming will exacerbate violent conflict? This could get interesting!

Furthermore,
they reviewed a paper published a few years ago in Climatic Change in
which a research team from China examined the “warmer equals more war”
hypothesis. Regarding that study, Tol and Wagner state “They construct a
dataset of climate and violent conflict for China for the last
millennium, and show that the Chinese are more inclined to fight each
other when it is cold.”

Tol and Wagner assembled the data for
Figure 1 showing a time series of conflict in Europe back about 1,000
years. To compare with temperature and precipitation, they assembled
reconstructed values for Europe available back to 1500 AD. These are
gridded data that come from meteorological observations as well as proxy
information found in Europe – the climate data had been quality checked
for inconsistencies. They even assembled climate model simulation data
from Europe based on solar and volcanic forcing as well as greenhouse
gas concentrations.

The map below (Figure 2) tells us what we
want to know – it shows the correlation coefficient between annual
temperatures and the overall state of violent conflict in Europe, and
all the blue indicates the coefficients are negative, indicating more
war in cold periods, not hot ones. And if your eye has been attracted to
the red regions where warmer weather seems to produce more conflict, be
aware that Tol and Wagner warn “positive correlations are evident over
the Balkans. These correlations should however not be overinterpreted,
because the Balkans are largely excluded from the violent conflict data
base.”

The two authors recognized some statistical issues dealing
with the violent conflict time series, most notably the high level of
autoregression in the data (the value of any year is highly related to
the value the previous years). They addressed this unwanted property a
variety of different ways, and in each case, they continued to find an
overall negative association between temperature and conflict. With
respect to the model generated climate data they report “Correlations
between the simulated temperatures and European wars also show negative
correlations, consistent with results obtained for reconstructions based
on observational data and proxy data.”

Obviously, Europe changed
over the 1500-1900 time period, and indeed, Tol and Wagner observed
“that the correlations are stronger in the more distant past. This
confirms the agricultural hypothesis. Agriculture became progressively
less important over the period, because of economic development, and
agriculture became less dependent on the weather, because of improved
cultivation methods and better fertilizers.” Fair enough.

In
their conclusions, the authors state “We present some evidence that
periods with lower temperatures in the pre-industrial era are
accompanied by violent conflicts”, consistent with what others had found
in China. Furthermore, they note “If anything, lower temperatures imply
violence, and this effect is much weaker in the modern world than it
was in pre-industrial times. This implies that future global warming is
not likely to lead to (civil) war between (within) European countries.”

Another popular claim about global warming is once again not supported by what has been observed for centuries – sound familiar?

Peddlers of phony scare stories are afraid to release data -- A scathing editorial from The Washington Times

What
separates a scientific claim from mere opinion is its ability to be
tested by experiment. No true scientist objects to having his theories
verified; the charlatan is the one with something to hide. Not
surprisingly, purveyors of global warming have proved anything but open.

In
the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Law and
Management, Australian researchers evaluated the community of so-called
climate scientists and found them to be "antagonistic toward the
disclosure of information." Professor John Abbot of Central Queensland
University, a chemist and lawyer, and biologist Jennifer Marohasy
studied the response of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia (CRU) and the Met Office - Britain's national weather
service - to various information requests.

The most noteworthy
of these was United Kingdom resident David Holland's demand for the raw
data underlying the infamous "hockey stick" graph that was published in
the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
assessment reports. This chart was the centerpiece of the claim that the
20th century was the hottest in a thousand years. The stir that Mr.
Holland's request triggered among the scientists who worked on the
report was captured in the Climategate e-mails.

"If they ever
hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll
delete the file rather than send to anyone," CRU scientist Phil Jones
wrote in a February 2005 e-mail. "We think we've found a way around
this." So much for transparency.

Under the British Freedom of
Information law, like the similar U.S. statute, information created at
the public expense must - with limited exceptions - be made available to
the public that paid for it. At first, the Met Office answered Mr.
Holland's request for data regarding a relatively uncontroversial
chapter in the IPCC report. When he asked them for similar details
regarding the hockey stick, the Met Office got around the law by
claiming the data were "personal information" generated in the free time
of the scientists involved. When this dodge failed to hold up, the Met
Office began claiming that the records had been deleted.

"Of
concern is evidence of a predisposition towards uncooperativeness on the
part of the Met Office, which also used spurious claims of deleted
correspondence and personal information in attempts to block the release
of information," Mr. Abbot and Ms. Marohasy wrote. The attitude isn't
limited to Britain. The Washington Times asked the White House Council
on Environmental Quality for its oldest pending FOIA requests. Among the
top five was an August 26 letter from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
seeking documents related to its work on climate-change legislation and
the Environmental Protection Agency's so-called greenhouse gas ruling.

None
of these simple requests should have been denied or delayed. Many of
those involved in purported climate science seem more preoccupied with
advancing a leftist, anti-business legislative agenda than respecting
the integrity of the scientific method. It's obvious why. Their
cataclysmic scare stories are unable to withstand scrutiny. By deleting
e-mails and using tricks to hide the inconvenient decline in global
temperatures, the climate alarmists prove to be not men of science, but ordinary frauds.

The Warmist media crowed too soon and the facts are now stuck in their throat

Many
times in this blog we have noted that the real news is the stuff not
being published by the MSM. Now, on the "climate change" front, that has
never been more true. The silence speaks volumes.

That
particular silence is the one that attends the publication of the Booker
column on 11 July, revealing to the world that the IPCC did after all
have feet of clay in its claims on the Amazon, with the source of
"Amazongate" finally traced to a Brazilian website.

When you get
an "exclusive" like that – especially as the original Amazongate story
was rather high profile – other newspapers and news agencies tend to
pile in and lift the story. This time, though, with only very few
exceptions, there has been silence.

One of those exceptions was
Lawrence Solomon in The National Post, who saw in the revelations the
first test of the IPCC in a new post-Climategate era of openness and
accountability that many seemed to be talking about. This, however, was
even then a forlorn hope. The retraction on 20 June by The Sunday Times
of its Amazongate story had already been hailed as a major victory by
the warmists, who were set on exploiting it.

Something of this
can be seen from the WWF press release which had Keith Allott, head of
climate change (there's glory for you) declaring that it " ... hopefully
indicates that after a period of some hysteria, balance and
consideration is being restored to the media's reporting of climate
science."

In fact, there was more expectation than hope. Led by
the WWF, the warmists embarked on a sharply focused campaign against
many of the newspapers which had written about Amazongate, demanding
that they followed The Sunday Times lead and retracted their own
stories.

Under this pressure, not a few editors were beginning to
wilt, especially as there were hints of further PCC references.
Booker's story, therefore, could not have come at a worse time. Although
no newspapers have yet followed suit, it was noted and, at the very
least, stopped the rot. No other newspaper has retracted its story.

Quite
how finely poised the pendulum is now can be seen by the continuing
silence. At the beginning of this week, a major international newspaper
was to have published a piece calling for the retraction of The Sunday
Times retraction, but internal politics have kept it off the pages so
far.

And, while The Guardian and others were quick to publish
news of Simon Lewis's complaint to the PCC, which triggered the ST
retraction, none of the papers which so prominently announced this
development have announced the complaint to the PCC about the
retraction, a complaint which has now been formally accepted and is
being investigated.

Interestingly, the silence also comes at a
time when not only has the IPCC case on the Amazon been trashed but
also, on the eve of the publication of a new tranche of research papers
which seriously undermine the doom-laden scenarios promulgated by the
warmists.

Just one of those, in the coming edition of New
Phytologist, puts loss of the forest at a mere six percent. This is a
paper by Marina Hirota et al on "The climatic sensitivity of the forest,
savanna and forest–savanna transition in tropical South America." With
this, the re-evaluation of earlier papers and the emergence of some
which have been little-cited, the warmists' case has never been weaker.
This makes the silence even more deafening,

If
ever there was a necessary state intervention, it was the loan agreed
by a dying Labour government to Forgemasters to finance the production
of components for nuclear power stations – of which there is a worldwide
shortage of capacity.

Yet, one of the first things the Clegerons
did was cancel the loan – and on grounds that now look very dubious
indeed, if The Guardian and the rest of the media have got the details
right.

With accusations of sleaze in the air, we are looking at
an administration which is on track to be just as vile and disreputable
as its predecessor, only in a fraction of the time, especially with that
sleazebag Huhne being accused of messing up the loan – possibly
deliberately (8 minutes into the video).

The current row follows
on from a report by KPMG which tells us that without more direct support
from the government, it is still uneconomic for utility companies to
invest billions of pounds in nuclear power.

The view is that it
is unlikely that the new generation of nuclear plants will actually get
built – something which has been evident for some time – simply though
noting the lack of news or actual progress. As the timetable slides, and
as we see the Forgemaster loan go down the tubes, there is only one
conclusion – we are stuffed, stuffed, stuffed.

The Chinese, who
recently reported commissioning their first fourth generation plant, and
has unveiled plans to increase its 9.1 gigawatts of nuclear power to 40
gigawatts by 2020, must be lost in amazement at the willingness of
British politicians to commit economic (and political) suicide.

Our
expectations of the previous administration were always low, but there
are some who actually expected more of the present incumbents. But it
seems to be a general rule of thumb when assessing governments that,
just when you think things have got as bad as it is possible for them to
be ... they get worse.

Senators John F. Kerry and Harry Reid conceded yesterday that they have
no chance of passing a comprehensive climate and energy bill any time
soon, saying they would instead push for a limited bill to address
problems with offshore oil drilling and to boost energy conservation.

“We
know where we are. We know we don’t have the votes,’’ said Reid, of
Nevada, blaming Republicans for stonewalling efforts to tackle the
comprehensive bill. The Senate majority leader, calling the lack of
Republican votes “deeply disappointing,’’ spoke at a news conference
with Kerry and Carol Browner, White House energy adviser.

The
stripped-down bill would include provisions that increase the liability
costs for oil companies involved in spills such as the BP disaster in
the Gulf of Mexico, expand the use of natural gas in long-haul trucks,
increase spending on land and water conservation, and provide rebates to
people who buy products that reduce energy usage in their homes.

Senate Democrats said they expected to find enough Republican support to pass the legislation before the August recess.

For
Kerry, the decision to at least shelve his signature climate
legislation is a stinging setback. With Senators Joe Lieberman,
independent of Connecticut, and, initially, Lindsey Graham, Republican
of South Carolina, the Massachusetts Democrat spent 18 months and
thousands of hours in meetings with colleagues, environmentalists, and
business leaders to craft and promote the bill.

Focusing his
efforts on forging a partnership with energy producers instead of
punishing them for polluting, Kerry created a bill that would put a
price on the carbon emissions, provide clean energy incentives for the
coal and oil industries, and offer tax credits to the nuclear industry.
The bill’s goal was to cut carbon pollution 17 percent from 2005 levels
by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

Graham pulled out of the effort
in April, saying Democratic leaders were not offering enough support for
their bill. “We’ve always known from day one that to pass comprehensive
energy reform you’ve got to have 60 votes,’’ Kerry said yesterday. “As
we stand here today we don’t have one Republican vote.’’

The House passed an energy and climate bill a year ago.

David
Hawkins, director of climate programs at the Natural Resources Defense
Council, called climate change a “real and present danger’’ that needs
to be addressed.

The decision to abandon the proposal in the
Senate was another concession to the difficult political environment
Democratic leaders face, as many rank-and-file are wary of casting any
vote that could be used in political attacks by Republicans.

Even
Democrats from energy-producing states were deeply divided on the
legislation. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, thought the
bill could lead to increased energy costs, while others worried about
pushing such a controversial political issue after Democrats had already
passed the stimulus and health care bills.

But after the oil
disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama sought to push the
public and Congress to back the comprehensive approach, saying the
accident illustrated the importance of reducing the nation’s dependence
on oil. In a speech last month in Pittsburgh, he said, “The votes may
not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming
months.’’

But the president and Kerry never found the votes, even
for a pared measure that would only limit greenhouse gas emissions by
electric utilities, not other energy producers.

While
Australia is increasing expenditure of consumer and taxpayer money to
the renewables industry, governments around the world have decided that
“enough is enough”.

Other countries are realising that renewable
energy is a massive waste of tax payer funds and has zero or negligible
effect on CO2 emissions. They are thus cutting or eliminating subsidies
to the grossly inefficient green power generators. Here are some
recently reported examples:

Wind power does not reduce CO2 emissions:http://www.masterresource.org/2010/06/subsidizing-co2-emissions/

Here
are a few examples of the ways in which Australian state and federal
Governments subsidise or give unfair advantage to renewables:

* Bans on nuclear power

* Renewable Energy Targets

* Renewable Energy Certificates

* Feed in Tariffs

* Direct government subsidies for renewable energy

* Tax and other incentives

* Cost of the electricity grid enhancements that are needed to
accommodate the disruptive, erratic renewable energy generators is
shared by everyone instead of being attributed to the renewable energy
generators.

* Super Profits Tax on coal mining.

* Threats to shut down or in other ways disadvantage coal fired power plants without fair compensation for the investors.

On
July 11, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced that it had
launched “a national advertising campaign as part of a broader effort to
showcase the dedication and personal histories of scientists studying
climate change.”

I know quite a few climatologists and
meteorologists and the ones I know have been courageously refuting the
global warming fraud for years, even decades. Beyond them, thousands of
comparable scientists have signed petitions and statements to the effect
that global warming was and is a hoax.

The UCS campaign,
however, is “an effort to educate the public about the work scientists
undertaken in their efforts to document and understand human-caused
global warming.” Excuse me, but there isn’t any human-caused global
warming. There isn’t any global warming insofar as the Earth has been
cooling for the past decade.

The UCA is part of a broad pushback
against the November 2009 revelations that have since become known as
“Climategate.” Thousands of leaked emails among a tiny band of rogue
scientists, primarily from the University of East Anglia’s Climate
Research Unit (CRU) and Penn State University ripped away their curtain
of respectability.

Writing about it in the July 12 edition of The
Wall Street Journal, Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental
sciences of the University of Virginia from 1980-2007, characterized the
emails as “suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists
engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of
both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist
Ken Briffa called ‘a nice, tidy story’ of climate history.”

Michaels,
now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was being polite when he
used the word “suggesting.” The emails between the scientists involved
in Climategate were damning evidence that they were engaged in a huge
fraud.

That fraud is now been whitewashed by supposedly
independent panels reviewing the emails and activities between Penn
State’s Prof. Michael Mann, the CRU’s Phil Jones, and Ken Briffa, and
others. On May 29, 2008, Jones emailed Prof. Mann under the subject
line, “IPCC & FOI” asking him to delete any emails he had had with
Briffa regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in order
to thwart any Freedom of Information inquiries.

The so-called
independent panels, mindful of the millions of dollars in climate change
research grant funding that both Jones and Mann had brought in for
their respective universities, saw no evil, heard no evil, and read no
evil.

As a full-fledged partner in the global warming hoax, back
in November 2009 when the emails were leaked, Francesca Grifo, a senior
scientist and director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program, was
asked by Science Insider what she thought. She declined to be
interviewed, but later issued a statement through a spokesperson.

“We
expect a high degree of scientific integrity by scientists, whether
they be in university labs or federal offices. But what may or may no
have happened does not change the science—ice sheets are melting, sea
level is rising and the top ten hottest years since 1880 include 2001
through 2008.”

Not so. As reported on July 16 by The Heartland
Institute’s James Taylor, “In the Northern Hemisphere, Arctic sea ice is
currently 19 percent below the 30-year average. In the South
Hemisphere, however, Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record extent,
continuing a parent of growth that has been ongoing since NASA launched
the NOAA satellite instruments in 1979. The growth in Antarctica is so
extensive that the poles as a whole have more total ice than the 30-year
average.”

Just what is the Union of Concerned Scientists?
According to DiscoverTheNetwork.org, the UCS “is a nonprofit
environmental advocacy organization with more than 100,000 members.
Seeing its mission as building a ‘cleaner, healthier environment and a
safer world”, the UCA takes public stands, purportedly based on
scientific research, regarding a variety of political and health-related
issues.”

The UCS was founded in 1969 by students and faculty
members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to oppose U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War. By 1998, it was assuring the public that
American analysts had exaggerated North Korea’s ability to produce
nuclear weapons.”

So the UCS is essentially a leftist
propagandist organization that is anti-war, anti-nuclear and missile
defense, and totally political in its opposition to any Republican
administration. Of the signers of a document, “Restoring Scientific
Integrity in Policy Making”, decrying the Bush administration, “more
than half were financial contributors to the Democratic Party,
Democratic candidates, or a variety of leftist causes.”

The UCS
continues to cling to the view that “Global warming is one of the most
serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic
well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our
emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and
practical solutions already at our disposal.”

There is no global
warming. The so-called greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane,
extremely minor factors, play no role in climate change within an
atmosphere composed primarily of water vapor.

I suggest a name change. The UCS should call itself the Union of Concerned Propagandists.

The
fact that the warming stopped late last century goes strangely
unmentioned. So even if all the dire effects of warming were true,
none of those effects can in fact be happening. And that warming will
resume is complete speculation. Geologically, we are in fact at the end
of a warm interglacial -- so powerful natural effects could be
unleashed any day which will lead to a new ice age. And if that
happens we will need all the warming we can get

The average
temperature of the planet for the next several thousand years will be
determined this century—by those of us living today, according to a new
National Research Council report which lays out the impact of every
degree of warming on outcomes ranging from sea-level rise to reduced
crop yields.

"Because carbon dioxide is so long-lived in the
atmosphere, it could effectively lock Earth and future generations into
warming not just for decades and centuries, but literally for thousands
of years," atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, who chaired the report, said at a July
16 press briefing held to release it. She compared CO2 to cheesecake:
"If I knew that every pound of cheesecake that I ate would give me a
pound that could never be lost, I think I would eat a lot less
cheesecake."

According to the report, for every degree Celsius of warming, impacts include:

* A 5 to 15 percent lower yield for some crops, including corn in Africa and the U.S., and wheat in India

* A 3 to 10 percent increase in heavy rainfall globally

*
A 5 to 10 percent drop in rainfall in southwestern North America,
southern Africa and the Mediterranean, among other precipitation changes

* A 5 to 10 percent change (increases in some regions, decreases in others) in stream flow in many river basins globally

* A 15 to 25 percent decrease in the extent of Arctic Ocean sea ice

The
report's authors were charged with evaluating a range of "greenhouse
gas–stabilization targets and describe the types and scale of impacts
likely associated" without any judgment on whether such targets are
"technically feasible" or which is "most appropriate." In essence, the
scientists evaluated the impacts associated with a given final level of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but did so through the lens of
temperature change.

This represents a shift in the usual analysis
of climate change, particularly in international negotiations, which
tend to focus on how much concentrations of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere will rise by a particular date. "Many impacts respond
directly to changes in global temperature, regardless of the sensitivity
of the planet to human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases,"
says geoscientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, a
co-author of the report, excluding effects such as ocean acidification
and CO2 as a fertilizer for plants. "Those impacts don't 'care' about
what the CO2 concentration is."

It also eliminates much of the
uncertainty surrounding potentially ill effects; whereas various
mathematical models may disagree about when and at what concentrations
Arctic Ocean sea ice disappears, they all agree that at roughly 3
degrees C of warming, the far north will be ice-free. "It's amazing how
consistent they become," Solomon says. "At what point do you get to
three to four degrees of warming, which is roughly the time when Arctic
sea ice is mostly gone."

Adds economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan
University, another co-author: "We will commit to an ice-free Arctic
sometime this century. We won't know definitively until 2090, but
essentially there's nothing we can do about it at that point in time and
it changes the climate system dramatically."

Already, the
planet's average temperature has warmed by 0.7 degree C, which is "very
likely" (greater than 90 percent certain) to be a result of the rising
concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to the
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That's about half what
can ultimately be expected from the roughly 390 parts per million of CO2
already in the atmosphere—the highest level the planet has experienced
in at least 800,000 years.

Unprecedented
claims require unprecedented proof, and we're simply not seeing it.
Mann famously would not release his computer code and data, but was
ultimately shown by Steve McIntyre to have fudged his statistics (specifically the R2
number that showed whether their results were relevant or not). The
story of this, and the incredible contortions that the "Hockey Team"
went through to get subsequent, equally flawed papers into the IPCC
Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) is described at length at Bishop Hill in Caspar and the Jesus Paper. Once again, data was withheld when requested:

To
have key arguments in the SI [published article's Supplemental
information] was most unusual and it quickly became apparent why it had
been done: the SI was nowhere to be seen. Even the peer reviewers appear not to have had access,
and once again, Amman refused McIntyre's request for the data and
code. His reply to this request was startling (and remember that Amman
is a public servant):

Under such circumstances, why would I even bother answering your questions, isn’t that just lost time?

As
with Mann's original hockey stick, the statistics for this supporting
paper were also entirely bollixed up. Statistically, the results were
meaningless. That's some impressive "unprecedented proof", right there.

The problem that is emerging for the people claiming catastrophic warming is that the scientific work they are relying on seems very sloppy indeed.
When the CRU was asked for their raw data so that their results could
be verified, they first refused, then refused a Freedom of Information
Act request, and then - when people still wouldn't stop asking - claimed
that they'd lost the data. The IPCC AR4 report, supposedly based solely on peer-reviewed science, was found to be one-third based on Press Releases
from environmental advocacy groups. The scientist heading up the
Working Group 2 portion of upcoming IPCC AR5 is still falsely claiming
that the science shows that hurricanes are getting worse due to Climate
Change. It's not - or at least, there are no peer-reviewed articles that show this:

I see that four climate scientists, including the incoming head of IPCC WGII, Chris Field, have written up an op-ed for Politico
calling for political action on climate change. That they are calling
for political action is not problematic, but the following statement
in the op-ed is a problem:

I
am unaware of research that shows either detection or attribution of
human-caused changes in extreme storms or floods, much less detection or
attribution of such changes "affecting lives and livelihoods". Can
you point me to the scientific basis for such claims?

This
is Roger Pielke, Jr., no Climate Change Denier like me, but an honest
scientist and one of the world's experts on hurricane damage. He didn't
hear back from Dr. Field.

Sloppy. Add to this the ClimateGate email exchanges
where the principals (Mann, Jones, et al) discuss deleting email
messages, refusing to release data, and how to prevent publication of
opposing scientific opinions by taking over the peer-review process, and
you get the flavor of something very different from the typical view of
scientists in white lab coats. A comment to Pielke's post is a must-read for this flavor:

The
drugmaker Glaxo, we now learn, has been lying for years about its
blockbuster diabetes drug. Turns out this multi-billion dollar drug
doesn't perform as well as an older drug (in a test paid for by Glaxo),
and it also gives people heart attacks. Glaxo withheld and hid this
information for years.

I very much hate to say this, but Glaxo's
behavior reminds me not just of Michael Mann and Phil Jones -- all
their erasure of emails, hiding of data, marginalizing and blackballing
articles not to their liking -- but of much of the climate change
establishment.

They've put their credibility in a very
shaky position. The fact that there are multiple inquiries into their
conduct is all you need to know to realize that even the "consensus
view" establishment knows this. The fact that none of the inquiries have issued an indictment
is cold comfort to Mann and Jones. They'll have to get to Mars on
their own, figuratively speaking. What they're burning to generate
political thrust is their credibility. As with Interplanetary travel,
it'll all be gone long before they arrive at their destination.

David
Ivory argues from New Zealand that the variation in energy received
from the sun has a much greater effect on global temperature balance
than the effect of greenhouse gases

by Dr David Ivory (University teacher, Scientist and senior United Nations staff member)

The scientific and public debate on what causes global warming has been very one-sided.

The
claim the so-called greenhouse gases (chiefly the natural biological
products, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) are the cause of
global warming is only a theory. It is not fact or an unequivocal
truth, even though the proponents of the theory would want to claim the
science behind their theory is beyond debate and supported by an
overwhelming majority of scientists.

The reality is the
scientists associated with climate change groupings represent only a
small proportion of the total physical and biological scientists around
the world, but collectively they have had an inordinately large
influence on governments and policy makers.

In addition, they
have adopted a condescending tactic to rebut criticism by disparaging or
questioning the integrity or knowledge of those who oppose their point
of view by labelling them deniers and sceptics and to claim the majority
of scientists accept the so-called science of greenhouse gas-induced
global warming.

The fact is there has been no poll among
scientists concerning their beliefs and a large body of physical and
biological scientists do not accept this theory (a recent scientific
publication rejecting this theory had 10,000 signatories), as they
believe the historic scientific record shows clearly the sun has always
controlled and continues to control global temperature, not greenhouse
gases.

Put simply, although very complex in reality, the earth's
temperature balance is dictated by the net effects of energy into (solar
irradiance), and energy out of (back radiation and heat loss), the
earth's atmosphere and surface.

If energy in exceeds energy out the earth warms and if energy in is less than out the earth cools.

The
greenhouse gas theory claims that increasing greenhouse gases restricts
thermal energy out to the point that the energy balance is positively
affected and therefore the earth warms.

The greenhouse gas theory
of global warming, however, is only a very recent proposition in earth
time, relating to the period of time since the industrial revolution.
It does not explain the reasons for the earth warming and cooling during
the millennia of its existence.

The alternative point of view
held by a very large number of scientists is that the variation in
energy received from the sun has a much greater effect on global
temperature balance than the effect of greenhouse gases on energy loss
and therefore it is the sun's activity that has always dominantly
controlled global warming and cooling.

The scientific record
shows clearly that over the past 3000 years there has been a more than
3degC change in global temperature, with both significant warming (in
mediaeval times) and cooling (little ice age in 1700s) trends above and
below present global temperatures.

What is important is these
global temperature changes closely follow radiation level changes and
indeed have the highest correlation with temperature change.

More
importantly, since the end of the 1700s the earth has been in a general
warming trend in response to increasing solar radiation.

And
with this warming trend the scientific record shows that glaciers have
been steadily retreating and sea levels rising for the past 200-250
years.

Thus it is important to realise these trends are not
recent and started long before there was any significant burning of
fossil fuels or increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.

However, the
most damning evidence against greenhouse gas-induced global warming is
the fact that there was a significant global cooling period between
about 1940 and 1975 (associated with decreasing radiation levels) even
though there was a three-fold increase in burning of fossil fuels and
greenhouse gas emissions during this period.

This clearly
demonstrates that global temperature was responding to changes in
radiation levels and that rising levels of greenhouse gases were not
causing global warming.

The recent continuation of the general
warming trend in the past 30 years, which is the period upon which the
greenhouse gas theorists exclusively concentrate, is associated with
further increases in solar radiation level.

Of course, the
greenhouse gas theorists claim this warming has been exclusively because
of rising greenhouse gases during this period, but as the rates of
glacier melting and sea rise continue as they have for the past 200
years, it can only be concluded that rising greenhouse gases are merely
coincidental with the long-term warming trend, not the cause.

Niwa
announced that the average temperature of New Zealand in 2009 was
cooler than the long-term average (i.e. cooler than more than 50% of the
100-plus years since temperature measurement started), with some places
between 0.5degC and 1degC lower than average; that there was record
cold weather in the last northern hemisphere winter; and that the area
of winter Arctic ice increased for a third consecutive year.

These are not coincidences.

While
it is too early to be certain of a trend change to lower solar
radiation and therefore lower global temperature, the fact that the
approximately 11-year solar cycle reached its lowest level in more than
50 years in 2009 may represent the beginning of a new global cooling
period despite higher levels of greenhouse gases.

If a second
global cooling period occurs during a further period of increasing
greenhouse gases, this will surely completely and finally discredit the
theory of greenhouse gas-induced global warming.

The bottom line is that there is no unequivocal scientific evidence that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases.

And
therefore, this means that the introduction of an emissions trading
scheme (ETS) is useless in reducing global temperatures and represents
only an expensive venture in futility.

The New Zealand Government
would have been better off delaying the introduction of an ETS, as has
the Australian Government, until the complexities of climate change are
better understood.

Apparently, humans have been changing the climate for eons. Literally.

Ancient hunters who stalked the world’s last woolly mammoths likely
helped warm the Earth’s far northern latitudes thousands of years before
humans began burning fossil fuels, according to a study of prehistoric
climate change.

The demise of the leaf-chomping woolly
mammoths contributed to a proliferation of dwarf birch trees in and
around the Arctic, darkening a largely barren, reflective landscape and
accelerating a rise in temperatures across the polar north, researchers
at the Carnegie Institution for Science concluded....

The
research attributes about a fourth of the Arctic’s vegetation-driven
warming to the decline of the woolly mammoth. If human hunters helped
kill off the large mammals, they bear some responsibility for warming
the climate, the scientists concluded.

“We’re not saying this
was a big effect,” Field said. “The point of the paper isn’t that this
is a big effect. But it’s a human effect.”

So everyone’s
a loser now: the climate change deniers, the climate change crazies,
and the woolly mammoths. The deniers, for saying humans don’t impact
climate change (answer: yes, we always have), the crazies, for saying
this impact must be stopped (unless you want to stop civilization, good
luck with that), and the mammoths, for being in the wrong place at the
right time.

The real issue is not “are we changing the climate?”,
but how do we adapt to the effects of change and/or mitigate them,
without jeopardizing the standard of living we have managed to achieve?
Between the socialists who would have us cap every oil well and eat
twigs for breakfast, and the conservatives who refuse to see any
correlation between human activity and climate change, lies a middle
ground: those who accept a measure of change as the price of progress,
and search for ways to cope with that change through technological
advancement, not luddite retreat.

Human activity is not, and will
never be, neutral. Indeed, if we wanted to stop impacting the
climate, humanity would have to stop existing, or return to a
pre-prehistoric lifestyle, when we didn’t even have the technology to
clobber a sufficient number of mammoths.

Sorry, but I don’t want
to turn back the clock. I like my fossil-fuel-heated house, my air
conditioned car, and my morning coffee, which probably logged more air
miles in a day than I have in a year.

In recent news
we heard that China has surpassed the USA as the worlds largest energy
consumer. It’s now the “Big Boy” on the block. All the proposed CO2
“control” treaties to date have given a ‘free pass’ to the poor
underdeveloped world on the theory that they needed special favors to
‘catch up’ to the evil west that had suppressed them. Well, folks,
China is now the “Big Boy” on the block. Not some little backwater
nobody striving to get their first light bulbs and flush toilettes. If
you want to “control” CO2 emissions, you absolutely must include China. And that is just not going to happen.

China
is a coal based energy market. Somewhere over 70% of their energy
consumption comes from coal. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and
changing rapidly as they are growing like a weed. But the simple and
well attested fact is they mostly use coal. So the CO2 “footprint” from
energy usage in China is far higher than in other counties, such as the
USA, that use more oil and natural gas in the mix.

Coal makes up 70 percent of China’s total primary energy consumption,
and China is both the largest consumer and producer of coal in the
world. China holds an estimated 114.5 billion short tons of recoverable
coal reserves, the third-largest in the world behind the United States
and Russia and about 13 percent of the world's total reserves. There are
27 provinces in China that produce coal. Northern China, especially
Shanxi Province, contains most of China’s easily accessible coal and
virtually all of the large state-owned mines. Coal from southern mines
tends to be higher in sulfur and ash, and therefore unsuitable for many
applications. In 2008, China consumed an estimated 3 billion short tons
of coal, representing nearly 40 percent of the world total and a 129 percent increase since 2000.
Coal consumption has been on the rise in China over the last eight
years, reversing the decline seen from 1996 to 2000. More than 50
percent of China's coal use in 2006 was in the non-electricity sectors,
primarily in the industrial sector. The other 50 percent is used in the
power sector.

Putting “controls” on US energy use (or
European or Australian or New Zealand or Russian or…) will simply move
the usage to China, increasing their economic growth at the expense of
others and moving more energy usage TO COAL and away from more
environmentally friendly fuels and sources.

Even
in the present western economic recession, China is growing, fast. And
that comes with very fast energy consumption growth.

BEIJING July 20 (Reuters) – China is likely to consume about 11 percent
more electricity this year than in 2009, with second-half growth easing
on the government’s curb on heavy users and a higher year-ago base, the
National Energy Administration said.

And a bit further down:

China, the world’s largest coal consumer, brought in a record amount of
foreign coal last year — about 126 million tonnes — on surging demand
boosted by a runaway steel sector and heating demands during a cold
winter.

The largest consumer is also growing the
fastest. Restrictions on other countries will only increase that rate
of growth and increase the total CO2 produced (as China is not as
efficient nor improving in efficiency as as fast as the western
economies).

In the computer world, this was covered by Amdahl’s
Law. The thing that improves the most just moves the problem onto the
thing that is not improved as fast. So you can move the “problem” to
China, but you can’t fix it.

Conclusion? China dominates. Nothing else matters.

Any
“CO2 Treaty” or “Cap and Trade” ( AKA Cap ‘N Tax) plan is doomed to
fail. Horridly and catastrophically. It will increase costs to produce
in the countries that sign up for such a plan, and those increased
costs will move the most energy intensive industries to the lowest cost
producers. The lowest cost producer is now China, and we see such
industries already moving to China at a dizzying pace. Adding more
“forcing” to that process will only accelerate it.

China mostly
uses coal, and will use ever more of it over time. They are locking up
coal supplies world wide by purchasing them or signing 20+ year
contracts. They have no intention of reducing coal usage. They have
also recently bought large chunks of Canadian Tar Sands, so you will
find them being used too, despite their high CO2 production.

China is not improving energy efficiency as fast as the west, so any move of processes to China will make more CO2, not less.

Add those three together and you find that Cap ‘N Tax and Koyoto like treaties will result in a net increase
in CO2 production as the sources simply move to China. This is NOT a
theoretical, it’s already happening (and in large part has happened.
Look at the size and growth of China steel production, for example.)

On
19 July, the Times published a frontpage lead story about a number of
U.S. American think tanks that have received funding from Exxon Mobile.
Some of these organisations were co-sponsors of the March 2009
International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

In its
article, the Times gave the false impression that the GWPF was
represented at the March 2009 New York conference and that the GWPF may
have received Exxon Mobil funding too. In fact, the Foundation did not
exist at the time. The GWPF was only founded in November 2009. I was
there as a private individual and an academic who was invited to speak
about "The Crisis of EU Climate Policy." Moreover, the Times knows
perfectly well that the GWPF is precluded by its articles of association
from accepting funds from the energy industry.

The Times should
also have been aware that Nigel Lawson had refuted the same misleading
smear in the Independent on Sunday of 14 February.

I have written
to the editor of the Times to set the record straight only for them to
refuse to publish my letter. This is the second time this year that the
Times has written a misleading story about the Global Warming Policy
Foundation, and for the second time it has refused us a right of reply.
This kind of behaviour speaks for itself.

The Times has now
corrected the inaccurate claim about me in the online version of its
story. But the damage to the GWPF has been done, and hardly anyone will
notice the correction to the online version now that it is behind a
paywall and the Times has lost 90% of its online viewers. All we can do
is to set the record straight on our own website in the hope that
interested observers will see through these smear tactics.

Benny Peiser

Letter to the Editor of the Times

Sir,
Contrary to the clear impression given by your report (19 July), the
Global Warming Policy Foundation was not represented at the March 2009
International Conference on Climate Change in New York, for the very
good reason that the Foundation did not exist at that time. It did not
come into being until November 2009; and I was there as a private
individual and academic.

Had you contacted us, or consulted our
website, you also would have discovered our explicit funding policy,
which makes clear in no uncertain terms that the GWPF is "funded
entirely by voluntary donations from a number of private individuals and
charitable trusts. In order to make clear its complete independence, it
does not accept gifts from either energy companies or anyone with a
significant interest in an energy company".

Discussing:
Panin, A.V. and Nefedov, V.S. 2010. "Analysis of variations in the
regime of rivers and lakes in the Upper Volga and Upper Zapadnaya Dvina
based on archaeological-geomorphological data". Water Resources 37:
16-32.

Background

The authors write that "long-term
decrease in seasonal peaks of water levels allows the settling of
relatively low geomorphic locations, such as river and lake floodplains,
while a rise in flood levels causes settlements to be shifted to higher
elevations," based on the logical assumption that "ancient settlements
could not persist under the impact of regular inundations."

What was done

In
a study of the Upper Volga and Zapadnaya Dvina Rivers of Russia, Panin
and Nefedov documented "the geomorphological and altitudinal positions
of [human] occupational layers corresponding to 1224 colonization epochs
at 870 archaeological sites in river valleys and lake depressions in
southwestern Tver province," identifying "a series of alternating
low-water (low levels of seasonal peaks, many-year periods without
inundation of flood plains) and high-water (high spring floods, regular
inundation of floodplains) intervals of various hierarchial rank."

What was learned

The
two Russian researchers report finding that "low-water epochs coincide
with epochs of relative warming, while high-water epochs [coincide] with
cooling epochs," because "during the climate warming epochs, a decrease
in duration and severity of winters should have resulted in a drop in
snow cover water equivalent by the snowmelt period, a decrease in water
discharge and flood stage, and a decrease in seasonal peaks in lake
levels," noting that "a model of past warming epochs can be the warming
in the late 20th century, still continuing now."

They also
report finding that "in the Middle Ages (1.8-0.3 Ky ago), the conditions
were favorable for long-time inhabiting [of] river and lake
floodplains, which are subject to inundation nowadays [italics added]."
In addition, their results indicate that of this time interval, the
period AD 1000-1300 hosted the greatest number of floodplain
occupations.

What it means

Interestingly, Panin and
Nefedov state that this last period and other "epochs of floodplain
occupation by humans in the past can be regarded as hydrological
analogues of the situation of the late 20th-early current century,"
which they say "is forming under the effect of directed climate change."
And this relationship clearly implies that the current level of warmth
in the portion of Russia that hosts the Upper Volga and Zapadnaya Dvina
Rivers is not yet as great as it was during the AD 1000-1300 portion of
the Medieval Warm Period.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum?
Yeah, yeah, whatever. But why, pray, should one even try to find
anything nice to say about the man who, more perhaps than any other,
was responsible for steering the already pretty nebulous field of
“climate science” into a branch of political activism so extreme that
it might just as well have rechristened itself “climate Leninism”?

Yes,
I’m talking about Stephen Schneider. Stephen Schneider – who recently
died of a heart attack, and God rest his soul – was the Stanford
university Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change who in
the 1970s was warning us all of an imminent ice age. Then, without a
flicker of shame or embarrassment, Schneider flipped and became an
equally fervent advocate of Man-Made Global Warming. So fervent that he
seemed to believe it was perfectly acceptable scientific practice to lie
about it, as he hinted in his most infamous quote:

“….. we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context
translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous
climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support , to
capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting
loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts
we might have.”

It was one such scary scenario that he offered for a Time magazine cover story in 1987 when he said:

“Humans are altering the earth’s surface and changing the atmosphere
at such a rate that we have become a competitor with natural forces that
maintain our climate. What is new is the potential irreversibility of
the changes that are now taking place”

This was at best a
grotesque exaggeration of what scientists believed, let alone were
capable of backing up with any real-world data, in 1987. We know this
because, despite four increasingly desperate IPCC reports, they still
haven’t managed to do so to this day.

So Schneider – RIP,
sympathy to his grieving relatives and all that – was instrumental in
setting the whole AGW porkie pie machine in motion, with consequences
we will be ruing for generations to come. He was an early advocate of
Post Normal Science: the philosophy which says that if your cause is
sufficiently pressing and just it’s OK to abandon the usual rules of
rigour and empiricism and lie and cheat and make stuff up.

And
to the very last he was pushing alarmist drivel to the max, as in this
final interview he gave to his university magazine. Here he is playing
the “nothing to see here” game with the Climategate emails:

I do not believe it’ll have any long-lasting impact on the
credibility of climate science, because it is fundamentally sound.
Unfortunately, the likely coming super heat waves and the hurricanes
that will take out parts of Miami and Shanghai, for example, will show
that, in a politically tangible way. And nobody will remember
climategate 10 years from now.

Here is providing his
disingenuous rationale for shutting out of the debate all those
distinguished scientists who disagree with CAGW:

The
reason that we do not ask focus groups of farmers and auto workers to
determine how to license airplane pilots and doctors is they have no
skill at that. And we do not ask people with PhDs who are not
climatologists to tell us whether climate science is right or wrong,
because they have no skill at that, particularly when they’re hired by
the fossil-fuel industry because of their PhDs to cast doubt. So here
is where balance is actually false reporting.

Here he is
explaining why the little people who fund his research grant and pay
the increased taxes and energy bills resulting from his hysterical CAGW
projections are too stupid to deserve any say in this debate:

We know we have a rough 10 percent chance that [the effect of
global warming] is going to be not much; a rough 10 percent chance of
‘Oh, My God’; and everything else in between. Therefore, what you’re
talking about as a scientist is risk: what can happen multiplied times
the odds of it happening. That’s an expert judgment. The average person
is not really competent to make such a judgment.

And so,
in the name of a problem that doesn’t exist, our political masters at
the United Nations and the EU, as well as in our own governments, are
presenting us with a bill for at least $45 trillion. They plan to ruin
our beautiful country with wind farms, remove our property rights
under the UN’s sinister Agenda 21, bomb our economies back to the dark
ages and render us increasingly in thrall to technocrats, bureaucrats,
and “experts” over whom we have no democratic control.

This is
war. A war in which the other side shows it has no scruples whatsoever
– as we learned for example yet again the other day with Bishop Hill’s
astonishing scoop regarding the Lord Oxburgh of Persil inquiry into
Climategate. You’ll probably know of it already, but I repeat it for
the record. It seems that one of the two people consulted as to which
papers should be examined by the inquiry was none other than Phil
Jones.

Can you imagine any court of law allowing the decision
regarding which information the prosecutors were allowed to use being
dictated by the defendant? I can’t. It’s a disgrace. And one which the
Mainstream Media remains unforgivably reluctant to report.

Dr.
James Hansen is the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. Dr. Hansen is right up there with Al Gore, Michael Mann and
the Climategate CRU on the list of people helping the UN to swindle the
United States and other western democracies out of trillions of dollars
through his promotion of the Anthropogenic Global Warming fraud.

Hansen
kind of got the ball rolling in 1988 with his publication of a climate
model that predicted dire global warming over the next 20 years if
mankind did not stop burning fossil fuels… Hansen et al. 1988.

Hansen
constructed three scenarios… “Scenario A assumes continued exponential
trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear linear growth of
trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas
emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the
year 2000.” ....

Hansen’s scenarios “A” and “B” predicted a
temperature anomaly about 1.0°C by 2009. Scenario “C” predicted an
anomaly of about 0.7°C by 2009. Since Hansen’s publication, atmospheric
CO2 levels have tracked Scenario “A” and CH4 levels have tracked
Scenario “C”. Even though CH4 is a more potent greenhouse gas, it
accounts for only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect:

CO2
is the “Big Kahuna”. Even if CH4 has 20X the greenhouse effect of CO2.
1800 ppb is 0.46% of 390 ppm…20 X 0.46% = 9.2%. At most, CH4 accounts
for only about 10% of the greenhouse effect of CO2 in Earth’s current
atmosphere.

So, according to Hansen’s 1988 predictions, the
global temperature anomaly should be about 90% of the way from Scenario
“C” to Scenario “A”… ~0.97°C. In reality, the global temperature
anomaly is about half of what Hansen predicted for a similar rise in
greenhouse gases.

The actual warming has been slightly less than Hansen’s Scenario C…

“In
scenario C the CO2 growth is the same as scenarios A and B through
1985; between 1985 and 2000 the annual increment is fixed at 1.5
ppmv/yr; after 2000, CO2 ceases to increase, its abundance remaining
fixed at 368 ppmv.”

In most branches of science, when
experimental results falsify the original hypothesis, scientists discard
or modify the original hypothesis. In Hansen’s case, he just pitches
the story with zealotry rarely seen outside of lunatic asylums…

Sensing
that their sky-is-falling theory is crumbling under scientific
scrutiny, the always-insecure global warming True Believers are losing
their cool, lashing out at critics with a mounting campaign of
scurrilous personal attacks, impugning the motives, integrity and mental
state of anyone who refuses to genuflect before the high priesthood of
anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The latest target of the
Warmists: Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a mathematician
and leading critic of the global warming theory, a.k.a. "climate
change." Monckton was recently mocked and browbeaten in a 115-slide
presentation by John Abraham, a professor of mechanical engineering at
the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. His "hit and run" slide-show
attack was an attempt to discredit a presentation that Monckton had
given in St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 2009.

Monckton replied
with a powerful rebuttal that, point by point, eviscerated Abraham's
embarrassingly dishonest production. Monckton called on Abraham and the
university to issue a formal apology, remove the libelous presentation
from the Internet, and donate $110,000 to a Haitian charity as
compensation for the damage done to his reputation.

As Joanne Nova observes:

"Abraham
went on to assemble a list of things Christopher Monckton didn't say,
complained about things he didn't cite (even if he did and it's printed
on his slides), pretended he couldn't find sources (but didn't take ten
minutes to ask), and created a litany of communication pollution in an
effort to denigrate Monckton's character."

The assaults on
Monckton and other high-visibility skeptics (for example, Marc Morano of
Climate Depot, Joe D'Aleo of ICECAP, Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. Fred Singer,
Anthony Watts and Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi) are further evidence that the
global warmists are in full retreat and resorting to slash and burn
tactics as they make a desperate last stand to defend their cherished
theory from the onslaught of countervailing scientific evidence.

Last year, 130 skeptical
German scientists co-signed an Open Letter of protest to German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, asserting, among other things, that a "growing
body of evidence shows anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role" in
Earth's climate.

The scientists derided global warming as a
"pseudo religion," said the "UN IPCC has lost its scientific
credibility," and dismissed the alarmist warnings of rising CO2,
claiming it "had no measurable effect" on temperatures.

The
critics of the atmospheric greenhouse effect have been relentless in
their attacks. They continue to blast holes in the theory, whose roots
go back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and
Arrhenius (1896).

As professors Gerlich and Tscheuschner have
pointed out in their research paper, "Falsification of the Atmospheric
CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics":

"[The
greenhouse theory] essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in
which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an
environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively
equilibrated to the atmospheric system.

"According to the second
law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.
Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a
widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such
mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation.

"Neither
the absorption nor the reflection coefficient of glass for the infrared
light is relevant for this explanation of the physical greenhouse
effect, but only the movement of air, hindered by the panes of glass."

A
growing body of scientists have joined Gerlich and Tscheuschner in
exposing the "accepted science" underlying the greenhouse effect. Here
are a few of their more damning statements:

(Heinz Thieme, engineer)

"The
phenomenon of 'atmospheric backradiation' is presently advanced as an
explanation of thermal conditions on Earth, and as the basis of some
statements about climate change. However, scientific evaluation in
strict accord with the laws of physics and mathematics suggests that
'atmospheric backradiation' is physical nonsense.

"An assessment
conducted in the light of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the
principles of vector algebra of the key greenhouse theory concept of
'atmospheric backradiation' suggests that it is simply a mirage. The
only 'Backradiation Phenomenon' that needs explaining is how this
physical nonsense maintains its place in numerous earth sciences
textbooks at both school and university level."

(Alan Siddons, radio chemist)

".
. . if the tenets of this [greenhouse] theory are valid there can be no
outcome other than a doubling of surface energy (a doubling at minimum,
that is, since there's no reason to suppose that radiation from the
now-warmer surface would not continue to be back-radiated, absorbed, and
amplified in a 'runaway' heating cascade).

"Simple as it is,
though, no scientist in the world is able to construct a model that
exhibits any radiative gain because the theory's tenets (called 'the
basic science') are not valid. On a theoretical basis alone,
conservation of energy (the First Law) forbids a model like this from
working. You can't obtain more energy than you put in.

"Just like
temperature, radiant energy flows do not add. Lumping two 70° balls of
clay together doesn't result in a single ball that's 140°, nor do 70
watts per square meter beaming back onto a body that's radiating 70
[degrees] raise it to 140 [degrees]. Frankly, it is stupid to think
otherwise."

(Claes Johnson, professor of applied mathematics)

"It
is surprising to see large parts of the scientific community including
academies of sciences embracing a hypothesis of global warming from
atmospheric CO2, without any convincing scientific support. It appears
that the mere mentioning of Stefan-Boltzmann's Radiation Law has been
enough to annihilate any further demands of scientific evidence.

"This
may be a result a 2Oth century physics education with both the
Radiation Law and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics being based on
statistical mechanics not understood by anybody. In any case, the
acceptance by the scientific community of CO2 climate alarmism without
physical basis, needs to be understood and corrected."

(Dr. Martin Hertzberg, combustion research scientist)

"The
most significant atmospheric component in the radiative balance is
water: as a homogeneous absorbing and emitting vapor, in its heat
transport by evaporation and condensation; as clouds, snow and ice
cover, which have a major effect on the albedo, and as the enormous
circulating mass ofliquid ocean, whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport with the atmosphere dominate the earth's weather.

"In
comparison to water in all of its forms, the effect of the carbon
dioxide increase over the last century on the temperature of the earth
is about as significant as a few farts in a hurricane!"

(Siddons, Hertzberg and Schreuder, "A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?")

"The
Earth is not "unusually" warm. It is the application of the predictive
equation [Stefan-Boltzmann formula] that is faulty. The ability of
common substances to store heat makes a mockery of blackbody estimates.
The belief that radiating trace gases explain why earth's surface
temperature deviates from a simple mathematical formula is based on
deeply erroneous assumptions about theoretical vs. real bodies."

These
are just a few examples of the mounting criticism directed at the very
foundation of the AGW theory -- a theory driven not by science, but
rather by a cabal of powerful elitists who seek to dominate and control
the planet's economy through a system of confiscatory taxation and
Orwellian people controls.

The "science" underlying greenhouse
warming alarmism increasingly is being exposed as pure fantasy -- a
house of cards built on manipulated climate models supporting
pre-ordained conclusions based on cherry-picked land-based temperature
data that has been homogenized, interpolated and adjusted to produce,
without fail, a politically correct increase in planetary warming.

But
as Gerlich and Tscheuschner observe, the science of climate change is
fraught with uncertainties and unknowns that make a mockery of the
predictive powers of laboratory computer models:

"The real world
is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It
is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and
run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is
really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the
climate model experts end up believing in their own models."

After Climategate and
Glaciergate the UN (Mr. Ban Ki-Moon) and IPCC (R.Pachauri) have
selected, who should investigate them. I wonder who Al Capone would have
appointed to investigate him, if he had the chance, and what the
results would have been? Probably similar.

Ban and Rajendra chose
the InterAcademy Council and the InterAcademy Council established a 12
member investigation panel. The investigating panel is an interesting
bunch of fellas. We have already heard rumours about some of them. This
is probably the first attempt to asseses them all.

The list looks
like they all met at some stinking rich UN reception with plenty of
caviar and expensive vintage wine. All of them are CEOs or top managers.
The nobility. I did not know, that being an independent and unbiased
investigator requires one to be a VIP top manager?

(Carbon market
is a big business for rich VIPs. Who else would be better to
investigate it than VIPs themselves? They know the ropes.)

So
here they are. They are totally independent, unbiased and with no ties
to environmentalism, UN, Pachauri or suchlike. Totally independent. See
for yourself.

1. Harold T. SHAPIRO: Chairman of the investigation
committee. By a coincidence he is in the board of the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, which happens to be one of the key sponsors of IAC (source).
By another coincidence he is one of the top sponsors of Mr.Pachauri’s
company TERI-NA (North America). For instance in 2001 Pachauri got some
45 000 USD from them for his TERI-NA (see here and here, page. 21).
Pachauri is to be investigated by his own sponsor? Well, I guess one
has to watch over his own investments, right?

2. Roseanne DIAB:
She was in the International Ozone Commission (IOC), where – I guess
–they would not let any climate skeptic. The World Wildlife Fund gave
her a grant for the environmental education (read: brainwashing,
source). Not only she is an environmentalist, she even poisons young
minds with that green slime (source).

3. Carlos Henrique de BRITO
CRUZ: Director of FAPESP, a governmental bureau, which finances
research and technical development in Brazil. Is Brito one of the
people, who decide, that alarmist research gets all the cash, while
climate sceptical scientists get none? This is a problem, which for
instance the hurricane expert William Gray complained about (see). You
get no grants, you cannot produce a study, so they kick you out of the
Uni. Publish or perish. Or is Brito the exception?

4. Maureen
CROPPER: An economist from the World Bank (along with UN this is the
institution, for which IAC is supposed to provide advisory services).
What is she doing here? World Bank is giving advice to itself? Also,
Maureen is on board of the eco-foundation Resources for the Future
(see), where a climate skeptic certainly would not sit. RFF is a sponsor
(yeah, another one) and a partner of Mr.Pachauri’s TERI-NA. What is
worse, Maureen was a member of the advisory panel to EPA. The very EPA,
which is now making a coup-d-etat to impose the carbon tax, bypassing
the US Congress, see).

5. Jingyun FANG: Teaches at the department
of environmentalism of the Beijing University. Hardly a place to look
for an unbiased person or a skeptic.

6. Louise O. FRESCO: She is
on board of Rabobank, which organises, among others, trade with carbon
credits at the electronic stock-exchange CLIMEX. If she fails to
“exonerate” IPCC, her colleagues will lose cash at the stock exchange
(see).

7. Syukuro MANABE: A pioneer of computerised 3D models of
climate. Worked with NOAA. I doubt he would like to make his friends at
NOAA angry. He would not get invited to BBQ any more. BTW, he is
nicknamed a “godfather of greenhouse gases”, due to his climate models.
And now they want him to be unbiased when assessing his own models, his
life work? (source). Something like: “My bleeming models overestimated
CO2 forcing, my work is crap, let me get some rope and hang myself.”

8.
Goverdhan MEHTA: A former director of the "Indian Institute of Science"
in Bangalore. This institute has many ties to Pachauri’s TERI. It was
established as a foundation of the Tata company. Tata was started a
century ago by an Indian industrialist (an Indian Ford). Pachauri is now
the boss at Tata. (see).

9. Mario MOLINA: One of the leading
authors of the Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC. So now he is invited to
assess his own work? How is he supposed to question himself? He is a
director from the freaked Union of Concerned Scientists. He signed a
letter to the US Congress, urging them to forget Climategate, which is
just a storm in a teapot. A solid unbiased guy.

10. Sir Peter
WILLIAMS: A vice president of the British Royal Society. We know the
management of RS are renowned alarmists. Lord Rees, President of the
Royal Society, is an apocalyptic visionary (in an interview he said:
“The chances, that mankind survives the next century, is 50:50”). Rees
is up to his neck stuck in the fraudulent whitewash investigation of
UEA. His predecessor Lord may called sceptics “crackpots”. And guess
what. This green extremist lord May was a member of IAC in years
2005-2009! I have no reason to believe Williams is any different.

11.
Ernst-Ludwig WINNACKER: The first director of the European Research
Council. I doubt the maoist Barosso would entrust this job to someone,
who is not a believer in the green religion. After all the ERC was
founded to strengthen the iron grip of politicians over the helpless
scientists. To make them write what the politicians want.

12.
Abdul Hamid ZAKRI: The director of the "Institute of Advanced Studies"
(A UN university) (see). Also he is a director of "Centre for Global
Sustainability Studies" in Malaysia, where alarmist faith is a must.
Also an advisor to the PM of Malaysia.

And the IAC director?
Robbert Dijkgraaf is nuts. In an interview he said, that they would not
investigate the Climategate e-mails, because, they are not “directly
related” to the work of IPCC. Amazing. And I thought, that they are
e-mails of the leading authors of IPCC describing the background, how
the IPCC procedures work.

I guess they selected the members by
randomly tearing a page out of the “Who is Who in Alarmism”
encyclopaedia. It seems like choosing NSDAP officials to investigate
Herman Göring at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

All these people have
built their careers on the IPCC alarmism. It is their faith. It is
unlikely any of them would be willing to undermine their own careers by
biting the hand that feeds them.

Is it really such a problem in a
planet with 7 billion people to find 12 unbiased people without ties to
Pachauri and his Blues Boys? And why is there no climate skeptic there?
What sort of court is that without any prosecutor being invited?

'The truth is the worst will probably not happen in our lifetime. But
it will happen in our children's lifetime. And it will happen big time
during their children's lifetimes.'

Three sentences above
taken from a statement issued to justify spreading alarm about climate
into schools. I want to dwell on the confidence in the assertions: the
'it will happen' and the 'it will happen big time'.

The truth is
we are not in a position to make such confident claims. Our knowledge
is patchy. Our computer models are recognised as inadequate for such
forecasts, even by their builders. They prefer to use the term
'projections' instead, but that is merely playing with words, a 'game'
exploited successfully by those who facilitated and did the final edits
of IPCC summary reports for policy makers, perhaps anxious that those
policy makers (who partook in some editing of the reports, see (2)), be
not too distracted by the primitive condition of climate science.

I make my counter-case in four chunks below.

(i) Some of the assertions underpinning the climate models are simplistic, speculative, and wrong.

The
application of a 'greenhouse effect' which does not explain why
greenhouses get hot, the use of radiation budgets which seem to defy the
laws of thermodynamics by displaying a relatively cool body (the
troposphere) transferring heat to a relatively warm one (the Earth's
surface) , and the insertion of a speculative feedback mechanism
involving water vapour. Previous posts in this series have materials
relevant to this.

'The scientific method requires that a
scientific hypothesis be judged by its ability to produce correct
predictions. The scientific hypothesis of human-caused climate change
has failed this test of science. To paraphrase the eloquent statement of
Professor Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics, it does not
matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how
many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has
published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong.
Period.'Source: (3).

In the 2001 report they [the IPCC]
said, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are
dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that
long-term prediction of future climate state is not possible.” James
Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis speculator said, “It’s almost naive,
scientifically speaking, to think that we can give relatively accurate
predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s
wrong to do it.” Kevin Trenberth, IPCC author and CRU associate said,
“It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system… This may be a
shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately what’s going
on with the climate, but we don’t.”

More leads on the
limitations of climate models can be found by using the tag
'model_limitations' at: http://delicious.com/ClimateLessons

(ii) The forecasting methodologies, or rather lack of them, deployed to raise alarm are grossly unsatisfactory. Experts in forecasting methodology, Green and Armstrong have this to say:

'The
IPCC WG1 Report was regarded as providing the most credible long-term
forecasts of global average temperatures by 31 of the 51 scientists and
others involved in forecasting climate change who responded to our
survey. We found no references in the 1056-page Report to the primary
sources of information on forecasting methods despite the fact these are
conveniently available in books, articles, and websites. We audited the
forecasting processes described in Chapter 8 of the IPCCs WG1 Report to
assess the extent to which they complied with forecasting principles.
We found enough information to make judgments on 89 out of a total of
140 forecasting principles. The forecasting procedures that were
described violated 72 principles.

Many of the violations were, by
themselves, critical. The forecasts in the Report were not the outcome
of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of
scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing.
Research on forecasting has shown that experts predictions are not
useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We have been
unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims
that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it
will get colder.' Source: (5).

(iii) Many of the
IPCC-projected temperatures over the next 100 years might be
troublesome, may not be unprecedented, and could be mainly beneficial.

In
which case, even for those naive enought to believe these forecasts,
there is no need for alarm, only the sensible anticipation of
challenges. In particular, we can prepare schoolchildren, rather than
scare schoolchildren. A popular article mentioning some of the benefits
of a warmer climate is to be found here: (6). More on benefits, with
further links here: (7). It should be noted that warmer air
temperatures of a few degrees on average will not raise air temperatures
over the major icecaps and glaciers above freezing - they may in fact
grow due to increased snowfall according to some warming scenarios. The
headline-generating scare of massive rises in sea-level is probably one
of the least credible of all the assertions of the doomsters.

(iv) A cooler world would present enormously larger problems and challenges than a warmer one.

Yet
this possibility is apparently dismissed by the IPCC, despite the
strong evidence from the historical records that a new glaciation will
arrive due course to end our rather pleasantly warm interglacial period,
and that there are good reasons to take seriously the possibility of a
briefer cooling spell over the next 20 to 30 years. The assurance with
which assertions are made about warming has served to weaken our ability
to deal with cooling, for example by wasting money on extravagant and
unreliable energy sources instead of building more coal and nuclear
power stations, and encouraging research in both technologies. A
website dedicated to cooling, with many links on the topic, is here:
(8).

Overview

The confidence in climate predictions is
misplaced. The alarms about warming are over the top. Cooling is a far
bigger concern. But note the phrase ‘the worst will probably not
happened in our lifetime’. This has immense value in freeing the
proponent from having to produce convincing evidence. ‘The worst is yet
to come!’ they can cry without fear of refutation. Like the High
Street placard bearers sometimes seen in cartoons and in reality, with
their ‘The End of the World is Nigh’ warnings, they can if they wish
define‘Nigh’ to mean '50 to 100 years from now’ and continue their
pacing without fear of contradiction. But while we'd chuckle at their
harmless eccentricity, the IPCC has found a more sophisticated way of
doing the same thing, and has been taken so seriously by many
governments that they are threatening to devastate their own economies
in response, and of course harm the physical and mental wellbeings of
their citizens on the way.

The
author of the comments above has just completed a 25 year spell in
statistical consultancy for industry. Before that he worked as a
physicist in nuclear fuel research for three years, as a schoolteacher
for one year, and as a meteorologist for four years

Eminent Physicists who are skeptical about man-made global warming

But they could be even more skeptical

Freeman Dyson:

* The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do
not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an
air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter
clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and
the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their
own models.

Robert Laughlin:

* The geologic record
suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing
into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s
beyond our power to control.

Edward Teller:

*
Society's emissions of carbon dioxide may or may not turn out to have
something significant to do with global warming--the jury is still out.

Frederick Seitz:

* Research data on climate change do not show that human use of
hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that
increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.

Robert Jastrow:

* The scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes
observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not
caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities.

William Nirenberg:

* The available data on climate change, however, do not support
these predictions, nor do they support the idea that human activity has
caused, or will cause, a dangerous increase in global temperatures.
...These facts indicate that theoretical estimates of the greenhouse
problem have greatly exaggerated its seriousness.

We see that
the main skeptical argument used by these eminent physicists is that
climate modeling is complex and that observations do not match very well
with observations. Fair enough.

But the eminent physicists do
not criticize the very physical basis of climate alarmism: the
greenhouse effect supposedly resulting from atmospheric backradiation:
The mantra that says that doubled CO2 will cause a global warming of 1.2
C, by basic physics which cannot be questioned by anybody eminent or
not.

Does it mean that the eminent physicists possess a basic
physical theory supporting the mantra of the greenhouse effect and
backradiation? No, it does not seem to be the case. It seems that this
theory is hanging freely in the air, because upon scrutiny it evaporates
into the atmosphere. Maybe it is now time for eminent physicists to
make this clear to the World and its people and leaders?

Frank Lansner has been a busy man, and he’s asking some very thought provoking questions.

The
Northern Hemisphere has a ratio of 40% land to 60% oceans, and the
Hadley Met Centre seems to use a similar ratio (NH HadCrut Series: 58%
ocean, 42% land). But Frank Lansner wondered why, when he graphed the
GISS land-data-set alongside the combined-sea-surface-temperatures
(CSST), GISS comes up with an “averaged” line that runs much closer to
the land data set and not the sea surface set. If it were weighted 60:40
(ocean:land) the combined Northern Hemisphere line ought to run
slightly closer to the ocean based temperatures.

So Lansner mixed
the land and sea temperatures in different ratios and graphed them and
an odd thing occurred. Perhaps there is some good reason for it, but the
GISS NH average line is currently running close to a mix that could be
almost 70% land, and only 30% ocean. Back in 1985 the NH Average was
closer to the sea temps as would be expected. In fact as late as 1995,
the NH line still ran at around 40% land area. But somewhere post 1995 –
1999 for some reason (see the update at the bottom for some good
suggestions) the average tracks closer to the 70% line. According to
Frank, this effect does not occur with the HadCrut average.

Frank
is looking for feedback and suggestions, and wondering if there could
be any other explanation. So am I. The effect is clear also in this
graph. The land-based datasets are the brown ones near the top. The blue
ones in the middle are GISS and then below that Hadley, then finally
the black line is the satellite measured average for land and sea, and
the combined sea surface temperatures. It’s interesting how closely the
satellite set compares with the sea surface data.

Lansner points
out that the key difference between the brown lines at the top and the
blue-black lines underneath is that Urban Heat Island only affects the
lines at the top (i.e. there is no urban heat island over the oceans,
and not too much “urbanity” near the satellites either). Lansner further
split up the satellite measurements into satellite-land versus
satellite-ocean and what’s especially interesting is how the
satellite-land values agree better with the ocean measures after 2001
than they do with the surface-land thermometers. Are we eyeballing the
effects of UHI and siting problems in the thermometers on the land, and
are GISS somehow inadvertantly amplifying these artificial effects with
weighting, homogenisation, gridding or averaging proceedures that rely
more on these land measurements than on the independently consistent
satelites and sea surface measures?

The
authors write that "ocean mass, together with steric sea level, are the
key components of total observed sea level change," and that "monthly
observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)
can provide estimates of the ocean mass component of the sea level
budget, but full use of the data requires a detailed understanding of
its errors and biases."

What was done

In an effort
designed to provide some of that "detailed understanding" of GRACE's
"errors and biases," Quinn and Ponte conducted what they describe as "a
detailed analysis of processing and post-processing factors affecting
GRACE estimates of ocean mass trends," by "comparing results from
different data centers and exploring a range of post-processing
filtering and modeling parameters, including the effects of geocenter
motion, PGR [postglacial rebound], and atmospheric pressure."

What was learned

The
two researchers report that the mean ocean mass trends they calculated
"vary quite dramatically depending on which GRACE product is used, which
adjustments are applied, and how the data are processed." More
specifically, they state that "the PGR adjustment ranges from 1 to 2
mm/year, the geocenter adjustment may have biases on the order of 0.2
mm/year, and the atmospheric mass correction may have errors of up to
0.1 mm/year," while "differences between GRACE data centers are quite
large, up to 1 mm/year, and differences due to variations in the
processing may be up to 0.5 mm/year."

What it means

In
light of the fact that Quinn and Ponte indicate that "over the last
century, the rate of sea level rise has been only 1.7 ± 0.5 mm/year,
based on tide gauge reconstructions (Church and White, 2006)," it seems a
bit strange that one would ever question that result on the basis of a
GRACE-derived assessment, with its many and potentially very large
"errors and biases."

In addition, as Ramillien et al. (2006)
have noted, "the GRACE data time series is still very short," and
results obtained from it "must be considered as preliminary since we
cannot exclude that apparent trends [derived from it] only reflect
inter-annual fluctuations." And as Quinn and Ponte also add, "non-ocean
signals, such as in the Indian Ocean due to the 2004 Sumatran-Andean
earthquake, and near Greenland and West Antarctica due to land signal
leakage, can also corrupt the ocean trend estimates."

Clearly,
the GRACE approach to evaluating ocean mass and sea level trends still
has a long way to go -- and must develop a long history of data
acquisition -- before it can ever be considered a reliable means of
providing assessments of ocean mass and sea level change that are
accurate enough to detect an anthropogenic signal that could be
confidently distinguished from natural variability.

For
those who are advocates of clean, renewable energy, the sun couldn’t
shine brighter on solar panels. Through government incentives for
homeowners and through grants and loans for solar companies, one would
think that the production of solar energy electricity in the U.S. would
be increasing exponentially. Yet it still only accounts for 0.02
percent of net electricity generated in the U.S.

Ouch. It seems
like that number should be higher with more homeowners and businesses
installing solar panels on their rooftops, but solar electricity has a
few obstacles still to face.

“Solar energy electricity still has a
lot of questions marks,” says Bill Wilson, president of Americans for
Limited Government (ALG). “Right now solar panels aren’t a viable part
of the market.”

The use of solar to create electricity is not a
bad idea. But the federal government creating a false market using
taxpayer’s money is. Before Americans take to solar panels as a valuable
product a few kinks need to be worked out with the technology.

First
of all you need sun. Because sunlight isn’t constant other forms of
electricity are needed as backup. Even when the sun is shining, changes
in atmospheric pressure, pollution, dust and the earth’s positioning to
the sun can affect the productivity of photovoltaic solar panels.

In
a summary of solar power, the Institute of Energy Research (IER)
states, “Though solar technologies are improving, meeting current U.S.
electricity needs with today’s PV technology would require about 10,000
square miles of solar panels — an area the size of New Hampshire and
Rhode Island combined.”

The summary goes onto say that
considerations would have to be made for power lines needed to get the
electricity from the sunny desert to other areas of the nation that
don’t have as much sunlight. If electricity had to travel great
distances across these transmission lines to get to its final
destination, then much of it would naturally be lost along the way.

Avoiding
power lines and lost electricity, homes and businesses are investing in
this relatively new technology as part of their infrastructure.

Gary
Gerber, president and CEO of Sun Light & Power and president of
CALSEIA in California, says for an average-sized house in California a
solar system carries a price tag of about $30,000. That does come down
some through various state rebates and federal government incentives,
but it is still a costly investment — especially when factoring in the
need for backup electricity.

Gerber stands by the benefits of a
residential solar system. “It is a simple job of math,” he says. “There
is great certainty about what kind of savings you will produce; the real
unknown is what the energy costs will be in the next 20 years.”

He’s
absolutely right. In California energy prices have been steadily rising
year after year, Gerber says, but that doesn’t mean that trend will
continue. It’s a gamble. And it’s a gamble that can cost you $30,000 if
you make a wrong decision.

If you decide to buy a solar system for your home, how long can you expect the panels to last?“Solar
systems on average last 30 years,” Gerber says. “A 30- to 40-year
lifespan is not out of the question at all.” Gerber has a strong
warranty on his solar panels for 25 years.

There are still
concerns about how long solar systems will last and what happens to them
if they no longer work or break. Gerber admits that the industry is
young and growing. “People are looking into and doing research on what
the long-term solutions are,” he says.

While most solar panels
are made of silicon, a well-used and understood material in the U.S.,
other types of solar modules contain chemicals like Cadmium Telluride,
which can be problematic. Cadmium is primarily used for the production
of rechargeable nickel cadmium batteries and also can be used in
coatings and plating and as stabilizers for plastics, as indicated by
the U.S. Geological Survey.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is nominating Cadmium Telluride to be included in the National Toxicology Program (NTP).

Treehugger,
an organization focused on green news and product information, had this
to say about the chemicals, “How can we conscionably posit that cadmium
telluride is fine in solar panels just because that technology is
‘green’ relative to electricity production, without having seen a
full-blown risk management evaluation that encompasses how cadmium is
produced and incorporated into the CdTe matrix, and, then, how it will
be reclaimed at product end of life? Well,…‘we’ can’t do that, is the
answer.”

Because the technology of solar panels is so new, the
recycling methods are still unknown. For the “green” market especially,
this poses a heavy risk to the environment. Gerber is confident that the
technology will be way beyond what it is now by the time these modules
need to be recycled.

It seems the environmental-friendly solar
panel industry still has some details to work out. Not to mention most
production, about 90 percent, of photovoltaic solar panels takes place
overseas and requires electricity in the production methods, thus
resulting in the release of greenhouse gases.

Regardless of the
fiscal costs to homeowners and the posed environmental costs to Mother
Nature, the federal government continues its heavy push for solar energy
through the use of solar panels. So much so that because production
costs in the U.S. are so high for making solar panels, federal stimulus
(taxpayer) money is being shipped overseas along with the manufacturing
of the modules. This doesn’t sound like a big win for U.S.

“The
American people want an end to government picking winners and losers in
the energy sector with subsidies to politically favored industries,”
says ALG’s Wilson. “If there was a market for solar panels, the free
market would create it on its own. Until then, we should continue
producing nuclear, oil, coal, and natural gas resources that provide the
foundation for meeting the nation’s power needs.”

Until there is
a bigger demand for solar panels in the U.S. and until the job market
and economy are back in stable conditions, maybe the government should
focus its efforts elsewhere.

Just because the federal government thinks it has a bright idea, doesn’t mean the sun shines on it 24 hours a day.

BRITAIN faces years of
blackouts and soaring electricity bills because of the drive toward
green power, a leading energy expert warned last night. A growing
obsession with global warming and “renewable” sources threatens the
stability of our supply.

Derek Birkett, a former Grid Control
Engineer who has a lifetime’s experience in electricity supply
throughout Britain, warned that the cost of the crisis could match that
of the recent banking collapse.

And he claimed that renewable
energy expectations were now nothing more than “dangerous illusions”
which would hit consumers hard in the pocket. “We are going to pay a
very heavy price for the fact there has been a catalogue of neglect by
the former Government which has focused on renewable energy sources,” Mr
Birkett said.

“We need a mix of sources and this takes time.
Renewables have the problem of being intermittent, particularly wind,
and we need more back-up capacity. By having all our sources in one
basket we are risking disruption.

“There is a lot of
over-enthusiasm by governments to push global warming, which makes me
very suspicious.” Less than five per cent of our energy comes from
renewable sources but the “disproportionate” cost of implementing green
technology runs into many millions of pounds, he said.

In a new
book, When Will the Lights Go Out, published this month, Mr Birkett
claims things will only get worse. He said the “lavish incentives” being
offered to developers of green energy are being passed on to customers
as the UK struggles to meet EU directives on carbon emissions.

He also warned that a growing reliance on renewable energy is creating widespread uncertainty in the electricity supply chain.

With
many nuclear power stations and coal plants ending their lives and
being taken out of service we “can’t rule out” people being left without
power. The real problem is the cost of making sure this does not
happen, and Britain’s lights “do not go out”, he warned.

“The
country is going to have to make a choice whether to go along with green
ideas of renewable generation or go back to coal and nuclear power.”

Even the New Scientist says that the climategate inquiries were an unconvincing whitewash

Is
Climategate finally over? It ought to be, with the publication of the
third UK report into the emails leaked from the University of East
Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Incredibly, none looked at the
quality of the science itself.

The MPs' inquiry - rushed out
before the UK general election on 6 May - ducked the science because the
university said it was setting up an "independent scientific assessment
panel" chaired by geologist Ron Oxburgh.

After publishing his
five-page epistle, Oxburgh declared "the science was not the subject of
our study". Finally, last week came former civil servant Muir Russell's
150-page report. Like the others, he lambasted the CRU for its secrecy
but upheld its integrity - despite declaring his study "was not about...
the content or quality of [CRU's] scientific work".

Though the
case for action to cut greenhouse gases remains strong, this omission
matters. How can we know whether CRU researchers were properly
exercising their judgement? Without dipping his toes into the science,
how could Russell tell whether they were misusing their power as peer
reviewers to reject papers critical of their own research, or keep
sceptical research out of reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change?

Russell's report was much tougher on data
secrecy, finding a "consistent pattern of failing to display the proper
degree of openness". Key data on matters of public importance - like
CRU's assembly of 160 years of global thermometer data - cannot be
regarded as private property. Even so, he ought to have joined Oxburgh
in calling for greater documentation of the "judgmental decisions" that
turned raw data into the graphs of global average temperatures. Data
manipulation is the stuff of science, but that manipulation has to be as
open and transparent as the data itself.

Russell's team left
other stones unturned. They decided against detailed analysis of all the
emails in the public domain. They examined just three instances of
possible abuse of peer review, and just two cases when CRU researchers
may have abused their roles as authors of IPCC reports. There were
others. They have not studied hundreds of thousands more unpublished
emails from the CRU. Surely openness would require their release.

All
this, plus the failure to investigate whether emails were deleted to
prevent their release under freedom of information laws, makes it harder
to accept Russell's conclusion that the "rigour and honesty" of the
scientists concerned "are not in doubt".

Some will argue it is
time to leave Climategate behind. But it is difficult to justify the
conclusion of Edward Acton, University of East Anglia vice-chancellor,
that the CRU has been "completely exonerated". Openness in sharing data,
even with your critics, is a legal requirement.

But what
happened to intellectual candour - especially in conceding the
shortcomings of these inquiries and discussing the way that science is
done. Without candour, public trust in climate science cannot be
restored, nor should it be.

After
a brief respite to digest the “climategate” scandal and the IPCC's
negligent acceptance of fraudulent claims about melting Himalayan
glaciers, the SDN echo chamber of environmental propaganda has resumed
in full form with the Peters-deBuys article of July 17. Such activists
are trumpeting the recent spring increase of 0.1 C in average
temperature while they completely ignored the previous decade decrease
of 0.25 C.

The environmental propagandists are now back on
message with their talking points in preparation for the Senate's
consideration of an energy bill. The article is right about one thing:
namely, that you should look at the data yourself; but not the
eco-massaged data they recommend but rather the raw data as summarized
in www.climate4you then click on May 2010.

The data show nothing
particularly dramatic for the last several decades: temperatures, polar
ice coverage, and sea level fluctuations that are all well within the
range of normal variability. For more details, see my recent Café
Scientifique talk on www.youtube.com and enter “climategate” and
“hertzberg” in the search box. The data show that average Earth
temperatures do not correlate with the recent increases in atmospheric
CO2 concentrations, and that neither of those quantities correlate in
any way with the human emission of CO2 by fossil fuel combustion.

The
entire theory that “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere can reradiate
energy back to the Earth and thus cause more heating, has been proven to
violate the laws of thermodynamics, and thus to be completely devoid of
physical reality. Acceptance of that theory by some journals,
scientific organizations, and government agencies both national and
international, represents scientific malfeasance on a grand scale.

DAVID
Cameron is to slash spending on green technology but pour hundreds of
millions of pounds into charities, voluntary groups and churches, the
News of the World can reveal.

The Prime Minister's first pledge
after taking over as Conservative Party leader was to slash greenhouse
gasses and promote eco-friendly energy.

But he has shelved a £1 billion fund to invest in new British companies using green technology.

The
money was supposed to be used by a Green Investment Bank which would
plough cash into firms building offshore wind and wave farms, green
power stations and other ambitious projects. It would have come from the
sale of assets such as the Channel Tunnel rail link and the Port of
Dover. Now any cash from any asset sell-offs will go back into
government coffers to pay off debts.

Instead, Mr Cameron - whose
party's logo is a green tree - will tomorrow reveal plans for a "Big
Society Bank". In a speech in the North West, he will say that more
than £350million sitting in unused or dormant bank accounts across the
country will be used to fund the new ethical bank. The cash will then
be handed out in low interest loans to start up community schemes. The
Big Society Bank will be up and running within a year.

Mr Cameron's idea involves transferring power away from the state and giving individuals more responsibility.

He
wants to cut state spending to help slash Britain's massive deficit.
But he will promise these new schemes will ensure vital local projects
which have depended on the government for cash will have MORE money to
play with.

However, to do that, the PM has had to shelve plans to
invest in firms setting up "green jobs." His Labour predecessor Gordon
Brown promised to create a million jobs by investing in new green
companies. But the money was never there because government borrowing
had got so high.

Former Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband
said: "This development shows that the coalition is abandoning Labour's
strategy of backing green industries to create the jobs of the future.
"Failing to press ahead with the Green Investment Bank damages our
chances of leading the world in the green economy of the future. The
short-termist, anti-industry mindset of the 1980s is back."

As
the “green design” economy grows, consumers tend to equate
energy-efficient construction with environmentalism. We assume green
buildings are in the interest of both the planet and public health. But a
recent dust-up between a nonprofit that certifies energy-efficient
buildings and a nonprofit concerned about human health has challenged
this easy association, raising questions about the costs of going
“green.”

A May report from Connecticut-based Environment and
Human Health, Inc., titled “LEED Certification: Where Energy Efficiency
Collides with Human Health,” raises concerns about indoor air quality in
LEED-certified buildings. A certification of the U.S. Green Building
Council (USGBC), LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design.

The report notes that LEED certification offers a total
of 110 points in seven categories, and that it’s possible to get the top
rating—Platinum—while scoring zero points (out of 15) in “indoor
environmental quality.”

The seven LEED categories include energy
and atmosphere; sustainable sites; indoor environmental quality;
materials and resources; water efficiency; innovation in design; and
bonus credits. Of the 110 points, 35 are allocated to energy and
atmosphere.

The report also raises questions about the quality of
water (not just water efficiency), and the presence of pesticides in
the building. It states, “There is no legal requirement to inform
occupants about the chemicals that have been applied, their potential
health effects, or their rate of dissipation.”

The report
recommends remedies to these problems, such as putting more health
experts on the USGBC board and requiring that builders earn a minimum
number of points in each category.

Scot Horst, senior vice
president for LEED at USGBC, said EHHI’s objections seemed based on
theory. “In practice,” he said, “it’s very hard to earn a Platinum
rating without addressing indoor air quality.”

According to the
report, as buildings become “greener,” i.e., tighter and more
energy-efficient, the danger of trapping pollutants inside increases.
The report’s lead author is John Wargo, a professor of risk analysis and
environmental policy at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies. In an e-mail, he said USGBC certification fails to mandate
adequate “ventilation rates.”

“The solution to pollution is not
dilution, as the ventilation standards suggest,” Wargo writes. “The true
solution is to avoid bringing the hazardous chemicals into the built
environment in the first place. “

New Haven has 12 LEED-certified
buildings, three of which are Platinum-rated. One of them is 360 State,
an upscale apartment building with ground level retail at the edge of
downtown scheduled to open later this year. “The [EHHI] report is right
on target,” developer Bruce Becker says. “We took indoor air quality
very seriously.” He says he spent an additional $100,000 to install wood
cabinets and doors that had not been treated with the preservative
formaldehyde. “It off-gases and that’s a problem; a green building tends
not to breathe as much as traditional buildings. If you have a tight
building that doesn’t allow any air movement, it’s poisonous.”

In
a June 4 open letter to EHHI, USGBC founder and President S. Richard
Fedrizzi wrote, “We could not agree more with the need for serious
action on improved indoor air quality. But your report fails to provide a
complete picture of how interconnected the built environment and public
health truly are.” He then invited EHHI to meet and discuss how the two
groups might collaborate.

EHHI accepted the invitation. The
meeting will take place on July 22 in one of New Haven’s architectural
jewels: the Platinum-LEED-certified Kroon Hall, the new home of Yale’s
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Regardless of the outcome, Wargo says he plans to continue working “to assure that green buildings are healthy buildings.”

Andrew
Bolt points out the insane policies of Australia's Green Party -- a
grab-bag of just about every nutty Leftist idea ever thought of.
Australia's Senate is elected by a form of proportional representation
so the Green Party does get some seats there

ONE election
result is already clear - and makes this debate about Tony Abbott’s
“secret” plans even more brainless. Wake up, people. The Greens will
have the balance of power in the Senate.

Labor sealed that deal
when it agreed this week to swap preferences with a party that its wiser
heads know would devastate the economy if it could. That’s politics, I
guess. Winning is all, and to hell with the national interest.

But
how grotesquely irresponsible. Labor is helping into power a party that
demands we scrap our power stations and close industries that earn us
at least $60 billion a year. Oh, and it wants us all to have more
holidays, because hard work and making money really sucks.

About
12 per cent of voters say this is just the party for them, and even
Labor now says it’s the best of the rest. Yes, that really is how
infantile our society, and our politics especially, has become.

But
Labor, whose primary vote has been unusually low, says this only
because it badly needs Greens preferences to tip it over the line. In
exchange, it’s agreed to help the Greens save its own five Senate seats -
and to probably win a couple more.

It was already virtually
inevitable Labor would win back some Senate seats from the Coalition,
which overachieved in 2004, the Mark Latham election. But this deal
also kisses goodbye to Victoria’s Family First Senator, Steve Fielding,
who lucked his seat in 2004 when Labor absentmindedly preferenced him
but will lose it now Labor is steering its second votes to the Greens
instead.

That will be all it takes. After this election, no
Government will be able to pass a law against the Opposition’s objection
without the support of the Greens, and Greens alone.

Never
before has this party had so much power - and so much opportunity to
finally inflict on us some of the policies that so many innocent voters
have treated as a just-dreaming position statement, rather than a
deliberate manifesto for the de-industrialisation of our economy and the
tribalising of our society.

This now is the real issue: how much
of our future did Labor sell off just to get these Greens’ preferences?
Never mind this week’s faked scare campaign about what workplace laws
Opposition leader Abbott might secretly plan. The hapless schmuck
couldn’t get them through a Greens-Labor Senate even if he wanted to.

No,
what really needs debate is what the Greens might now demand from a
Gillard government in exchange for its vote. And that, in turn, needs
journalists especially to at last take seriously this party’s policies.

The
truth is that the Greens’ manifesto has not been written down just for a
joke or some mood music. It is the serious work of the serious
ideological warriors hiding behind Bob Brown’s amiable front.

Vote
Greens in this election and you won’t get cuddlier koalas, bigger hugs
and cleaner rivers.In fact, you’ll be voting to “transition from coal
exports”, which means ending a trade worth $55 billion a year. You’ll
be voting to “end ... the mining and export of uranium”, worth another
$900 million a year. You’ll be demanding farmers “remove as far as
possible” all genetically modified crops, which includes GM cotton worth
about $1.3 billion a year.

You’ll be voting to close down many
other businesses and industries, including the export of woodchips from
old-growth forests, certain kinds of fishing, oil and mineral
exploration in parks or wildernesses, and new coal mines of any kind.
You’ll even be voting to close the Lucas Heights nuclear facility, even
though it actually produces treatments for cancer.

In fact,
you’ll be voting for policies deliberately intended to make us poorer.
Less industrialised. Or as the Greens’ policy puts it, for a “reduction
of Australia’s use of natural resources to a level that is sustainable
and socially just”. Whatever that formula means.

Maybe you think
it won’t matter if a few industries get shut, as long as the rest make
up for this loss of 6 per cent of our national income each year. Maybe
you really are that stupid.

But you haven’t heard the rest of the
Greens’ policies yet, have you? You see, the Greens also plan to shut
the coal-fired power stations that produce 80 per cent of the
electricity used to run our homes, factories, offices, hospitals, shops,
traffic lights and airports. They not only “oppose the establishment
of new coal-fired power stations” - claiming they make the planet
dangerously hot - but intend to ban new coal supplies for those we
already have. What’s more, they’ll hit our power stations with a new
carbon tax to make wicked electricity too expensive for you.

Do
you have any idea how many businesses would be driven broke by this
green frolic? How many hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost?

Already
Labor’s threat to bring in emissions trading some time after 2012 has
caused power station operators to cancel half the $18 billion they’d
planned a year ago to spend on maintaining the ones they had or building
the new power stations we’ll need as we grow bigger and richer. Power
shortages now seem certain.

But if you think the Greens must
surely have alternative power sources in mind to make up for the 80 per
cent they’ll switch off, you’re dreaming. The Greens want to keep
Labor’s ban on nuclear power, the most likely alternative and greenest
source of base-load power. They even want to scrap government-financed
research into carbon capture and storage, which is Labor’s one hope of
making coal-fired stations still greenhouse-friendly.

Sure, the
Greens do promise to somehow get 30 per cent of our electricity from
“renewable” sources within just 10 years, but there’s a small problem.
Correction, huge one. We’ve only managed to lift our renewable energy
to 6 per cent after all these years of subsidies, and three quarters of
that is from hydro-electricity. But guess which party bans any more of
these river-killing dams?

So consider. If the Greens get their
avowed way, we’ll have huge industries banned, businesses driven broke
and power prices driven through the roof, with not enough electricity
for what industries will be left.

So with our income slashed to
ribbons, what do the Greens propose? Not deep cuts in every government
program, but a spending spree to make Kevin Rudd seem a miser. It’s
free money for everyone. If you vote for the Greens, you’re voting for
an extra week of holidays for all, “mandated shorter standard working
hours”, more pay to women workers, higher pay for casuals, and better
weekly benefits to students and artists.

More pay for less work,
at the mere stroke of a green pen. Isn’t this a darling way to
reorganise the economy? What could possibly go wrong?

Too
spendthrift, you complain? Wise up, friend. The Greens have barely
started. They promise to lift foreign aid to “a minimum of 0.7 per cent
of GDP by 2010”, which means an instant rise in handouts of $4 billion a
year.

Another $2 billion a year will go to scrap tertiary fees
and forgiving all HECS debts. Billions more will go on putting train
lines underground and subsidising “green” power.

On and on the
spending spirals, as if the Greens are the party for spoiled children
using daddy’s credit card, with not the slightest giddy thought of how
it’s all going to be paid for.

Oh, excuse me - the Greens do
lazily assume that the bill will be covered by hiking corporate taxes,
hitting the richer 5 per cent of us with wealth taxes, and slugging air
travellers. Show us your costings, Bob. Wouldn’t come within a bull’s
roar.

I’d be amazed if after a year of two of this that anyone
would want to come to a country that by then would be a smoking hole in
the ground. Yet the Greens plan to do their airy best to attract more
beggars to their new nation of freeloaders.

Any “asylum seeker”
making it here by boat would be freed into the community within 14 days,
security checks permitting, and rewarded with instant benefits, medical
services and school for the children. These tempting goodies will be
offered to “environmental refugees”, too.

Guess to the nearest
10,000 how many people from Third World countries will want to cash in?
Guess how many more billions this will cost, and what fresh tensions
we’ll import?

By then, though, we’ll have more of our own ethnic
tensions than ever, as the Greens divide us into tribes, squabbling over
precedent and spoils.

Aborigines will be written into the
constitution as having “prior occupation and sovereignty” over this
shared land, and will be allowed to “reclaim language, heritage and
cultural practices”. Like payback?

The more newly arrived will
win the right to have government programs “implemented in languages
other than English”, and to have their “cultural and linguistic
diversity ... respected”. Like shariah law?

As for our defence
ties with the United States, well, phooey to those white capitalist
imperialists. The Greens want to close the joint bases here, pull out
of the US missile defence program and end the ANZUS treaty. Naturally,
many counter-terrorism laws will also be “reformed”. Which means
weakened.

There’s not much point in going on, picking out the
economic idiocy and social lunacy of a manifesto that would leave us
poorer, more divided and more defenceless. The laughing stock of Asia.

It’s
all so crazy that you may dismiss it as the idle dreams of homoeopaths
in tofu sandals. But a new, militant industrial agenda is also buried in
this New Age madness, signalling the arrival in Bob Brown’s party of
“watermelon Greens” - green outside and red in, and meaning business big
time.

These, like lead NSW candidate Lee Rhiannon, seem Greens
more of convenience than faith, using this doctors’ wives party to
smuggle in the kind of hard-Left politics that would scare off the
voters if they saw it coming under a hammer and sickle.

But be
clear: vote for their Greens and you’re voting for a return of union
muscle of the most bullying kind. Secret ballots for industrial action
would be abolished. Unions would have a formal right to strike, and
their victims less right to sue for damages. Union bosses would have
more power to barge into your workplace, and to dragoon workers into
“industry wide agreements that are union negotiated”.

This is
what a vote for the Greens really means. And it’s this party of vandals,
tribalists and closet totalitarians that shameless Labor now helps to
such threatening influence.

Prof.
Spencer is an eminent climate scientist and points out many reasons why
the case for human emissions causing warming is at least "not proven".
He has however always in the past accepted the theory that CO2 COULD
cause warming. A recent upwelling of dissent on that point by physical
scientists has however obviously jarred him so you will see from the
rubric below (under his "7" heading) that he is now reserving judgment
on that point. He is leaving open the possibility that the whole theory
was misconceived from the beginning and in fact contravenes the laws of
physics

I receive many e-mails, and a recurring complaint is
that many of my posts are too technical to understand. This morning’s
installment arrived with the subject line, “Please Talk to Us”, and
suggested I provide short, concise, easily understood summaries and
explanations “for dummies”.

So, here’s a list of basic climate
change questions, and brief answers based upon what I know today. I
might update them as I receive suggestions and comments. I will also be
adding links to other sources, and some visual aids, as appropriate.

Deja
vu tells me I might have done this once before, but I’m too lazy to go
back and see. So, I’ll start over from scratch. (Insert smiley)

It
is important to understand at the outset that those of us who are
skeptical of mankind’s influence on climate have a wide variety of views
on the subject, and we can’t all be right. In fact, in this business,
it is really easy to be wrong. It seems like everyone has a theory of
what causes climate change. But it only takes one of us to be right for
the IPCC’s anthropogenic global warming (AGW) house of cards to
collapse.

As I like to say, taking measurements of the climate
system is much easier than figuring out what those measurements mean in
terms of cause and effect. Generally speaking, it’s not the warming that
is in dispute…it’s the cause of the warming.

If you disagree
with my views on something, please don’t flame me. Chances are, I’ve
already heard your point of view; very seldom am I provided with new
evidence I haven’t already taken into account.

1) Are Global
Temperatures Rising Now? There is no way to know, because natural
year-to-year variability in global temperature is so large, with warming
and cooling occurring all the time. What we can say is that surface and
lower atmospheric temperature have risen in the last 30 to 50 years,
with most of that warming in the Northern Hemisphere. Also, the
magnitude of recent warming is somewhat uncertain, due to problems in
making long-term temperature measurements with thermometers without
those measurements being corrupted by a variety of non-climate effects.
But there is no way to know if temperatures are continuing to rise
now…we only see warming (or cooling) in the rearview mirror, when we
look back in time.

2) Why Do Some Scientists Say It’s Cooling,
while Others Say that Warming is Even Accelerating? Since there is so
much year-to-year (and even decade-to-decade) variability in global
average temperatures, whether it has warmed or cooled depends upon how
far back you look in time. For instance, over the last 100 years, there
was an overall warming which was stronger toward the end of the 20th
Century. This is why some say “warming is accelerating”. But if we look
at a shorter, more recent period of time, say since the record warm year
of 1998, one could say that it has cooled in the last 10-12 years. But,
as I mentioned above, neither of these can tell us anything about
whether warming is happening “now”, or will happen in the future.

3)
Haven’t Global Temperatures Risen Before? Yes. In the longer term, say
hundreds to thousands of years, there is considerable indirect, proxy
evidence (not from thermometers) of both warming and cooling. Since
humankind can’t be responsible for these early events, this is evidence
that nature can cause warming and cooling. If that is the case, it then
opens up the possibility that some (or most) of the warming in the last
50 years has been natural, too. While many geologists like to point to
much larger temperature changes are believed to have occurred over
millions of years, I am unconvinced that this tells us anything of use
for understanding how humans might influence climate on time scales of
10 to 100 years.

4) But Didn’t the “Hockey Stick” Show Recent
Warming to be Unprecedented? The “hockey Stick” reconstructions of
temperature variations over the last 1 to 2 thousand years have been a
huge source of controversy. The hockey stick was previously used by the
IPCC as a veritable poster child for anthropogenic warming, since it
seemed to indicate there have been no substantial temperature changes
over the last 1,000 to 2,000 years until humans got involved in the 20th
Century. The various versions of the hockey stick were based upon
limited amounts of temperature proxy evidence — primarily tree rings —
and involved questionable statistical methods. In contrast, I think the
bulk of the proxy evidence supports the view that it was at least as
warm during the Medieval Warm Period, around 1000 AD. The very fact that
recent tree ring data erroneously suggests cooling in the last 50
years, when in fact there has been warming, should be a warning flag
about using tree ring data for figuring out how warm it was 1,000 years
ago. But without actual thermometer data, we will never know for sure.

5)
Isn’t the Melting of Arctic Sea Ice Evidence of Warming? Warming,
yes…manmade warming, no. Arctic sea ice naturally melts back every
summer, but that meltback was observed to reach a peak in 2007. But we
have relatively accurate, satellite-based measurements of Arctic (and
Antarctic) sea ice only since 1979. It is entirely possible that late
summer Arctic Sea ice cover was just as low in the 1920s or 1930s, a
period when Arctic thermometer data suggests it was just as warm.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know, because we did not have
satellites back then. Interestingly, Antarctic sea ice has been growing
nearly as fast as Arctic ice has been melting over the last 30+ years.

6)
What about rising sea levels? I must confess, I don’t pay much
attention to the sea level issue. I will say that, to the extent that
warming occurs, sea levels can be expected to also rise to some extent.
The rise is partly due to thermal expansion of the water, and partly due
to melting or shedding of land-locked ice (the Greenland and Antarctic
ice sheets, and glaciers). But this says nothing about whether or not
humans are the cause of that warming. Since there is evidence that
glacier retreat and sea level rise started well before humans can be
blamed, causation is — once again — a major source of uncertainty.

7)
Is Increasing CO2 Even Capable of Causing Warming? There are some very
intelligent people out there who claim that adding more carbon dioxide
to the atmosphere can’t cause warming anyway. They claim things like,
“the atmospheric CO2 absorption bands are already saturated”, or
something else very technical. [And for those more technically-minded
persons, yes, I agree that the effective radiating temperature of the
Earth in the infrared is determined by how much sunlight is absorbed by
the Earth. But that doesn't mean the lower atmosphere cannot warm from
adding more greenhouse gases, because at the same time they also cool
the upper atmosphere]. While it is true that most of the CO2-caused
warming in the atmosphere was there before humans ever started burning
coal and driving SUVs, this is all taken into account by computerized
climate models that predict global warming. Adding more “should” cause
warming, with the magnitude of that warming being the real question. But I’m still open to the possibility that a major error has been made on this fundamental point. Stranger things have happened in science before.

8
) Is Atmospheric CO2 Increasing? Yes, and most strongly in the last 50
years…which is why “most” climate researchers think the CO2 rise is the
cause of the warming. Our site measurements of CO2 increase from around
the world are possibly the most accurate long-term, climate-related,
measurements in existence.

9) Are Humans Responsible for the CO2
Rise? While there are short-term (year-to-year) fluctuations in the
atmospheric CO2 concentration due to natural causes, especially El Nino
and La Nina, I currently believe that most of the long-term increase is
probably due to our use of fossil fuels. But from what I can tell, the
supposed “proof” of humans being the source of increasing CO2 — a change
in the atmospheric concentration of the carbon isotope C13 — would also
be consistent with a natural, biological source. The current
atmospheric CO2 level is about 390 parts per million by volume, up from a
pre-industrial level estimated to be around 270 ppm…maybe less. CO2
levels can be much higher in cities, and in buildings with people in
them.

10) But Aren’t Natural CO2 Emissions About 20 Times the
Human Emissions? Yes, but nature is believed to absorb CO2 at about the
same rate it is produced. You can think of the reservoir of atmospheric
CO2 as being like a giant container of water, with nature pumping in a
steady stream into the bottom of the container (atmosphere) in some
places, sucking out about the same amount in other places, and then
humans causing a steady drip-drip-drip into the container.
Significantly, about 50% of what we produce is sucked out of the
atmosphere by nature, mostly through photosynthesis. Nature loves the
stuff. CO2 is the elixir of life on Earth. Imagine the howls of protest
there would be if we were destroying atmospheric CO2, rather than
creating more of it.

11) Is Rising CO2 the Cause of Recent
Warming? While this is theoretically possible, I think it is more likely
that the warming is mostly natural. At the very least, we have no way
of determining what proportion is natural versus human-caused.

12)
Why Do Most Scientists Believe CO2 is Responsible for the Warming?
Because (as they have told me) they can’t think of anything else that
might have caused it. Significantly, it’s not that there is evidence
nature can’t be the cause, but a lack of sufficiently accurate
measurements to determine if nature is the cause. This is a hugely
important distinction, and one the public and policymakers have been
misled on by the IPCC.

13) If Not Humans, What could Have Caused
Recent Warming? This is one of my areas of research. I believe that
natural changes in the amount of sunlight being absorbed by the Earth —
due to natural changes in cloud cover — are responsible for most of the
warming. Whether that is the specific mechanism or not, I advance the
minority view that the climate system can change all by itself. Climate
change does not require an “external” source of forcing, such as a
change in the sun.

14) So, What Could Cause Natural Cloud
Changes? I think small, long-term changes in atmospheric and oceanic
flow patterns can cause ~1% changes in how much sunlight is let in by
clouds to warm the Earth. This is all that is required to cause global
warming or cooling. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficiently accurate
cloud measurements to determine whether this is the primary cause of
warming in the last 30 to 50 years.

15) How Significant is the
Climategate Release of E-Mails? While Climategate does not, by itself,
invalidate the IPCC’s case that global warming has happened, or that
humans are the primary cause of that warming, it DOES illustrate
something I emphasized in my first book, “Climate Confusion”: climate
researchers are human, and prone to bias.

16) Why Would Bias in
Climate Research be Important? I thought Scientists Just Follow the Data
Where It Leads Them When researchers approach a problem, their
pre-conceived notions often guide them. It’s not that the IPCC’s claim
that humans cause global warming is somehow untenable or impossible,
it’s that political and financial pressures have resulted in the IPCC
almost totally ignoring alternative explanations for that warming.

17)
How Important Is “Scientific Consensus” in Climate Research? In the
case of global warming, it is nearly worthless. The climate system is so
complex that the vast majority of climate scientists — usually experts
in variety of specialized fields — assume there are more knowledgeable
scientists, and they are just supporting the opinions of their
colleagues. And among that small group of most knowledgeable experts,
there is a considerable element of groupthink, herd mentality, peer
pressure, political pressure, support of certain energy policies, and
desire to Save the Earth — whether it needs to be saved or not.

18)
How Important are Computerized Climate Models? I consider climate
models as being our best way of exploring cause and effect in the
climate system. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and
unless you can demonstrate causation with numbers in equations, you are
stuck with scientists trying to persuade one another by waving their
hands. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that climate models will
ever produce a useful prediction of the future. Nevertheless, we must
use them, and we learn a lot from them. My biggest concern is that
models have been used almost exclusively for supporting the claim that
humans cause global warming, rather than for exploring alternative
hypotheses — e.g. natural climate variations — as possible causes of
that warming.

19) What Do I Predict for Global Temperature
Changes in the Future? I tend to shy away from long-term predictions,
because there are still so many uncertainties. When pressed, though, I
tend to say that I think cooling in our future is just as real a
possibility as warming. Of course, a third possibility is relatively
steady temperatures, without significant long-term warming or cooling.
Keep in mind that, while you will find out tomorrow whether your
favorite weather forecaster is right or wrong, no one will remember 50
years from now a scientist today wrongly predicting we will all die from
heat stroke by 2060.

Concluding Remarks

Climate
researchers do not know nearly as much about the causes of climate
change as they profess. We have a pretty good understanding of how the
climate system works on average…but the reasons for small, long-term
changes in climate system are still extremely uncertain.

The
total amount of CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the last 100
years has upset the radiative energy budget of the Earth by only 1%. How
the climate system responds to that small “poke” is very uncertain. The
IPCC says there will be strong warming, with cloud changes making the
warming worse. I claim there will be weak warming, with cloud changes
acting to reduce the influence of that 1% change. The difference between
these two outcomes is whether cloud feedbacks are positive (the IPCC
view), or negative (the view I and a minority of others have).

So
far, neither side has been able to prove their case. That uncertainty
even exists on this core issue is not appreciated by many scientists!

Again
I will emphasize, some very smart people who consider themselves
skeptics will disagree with some of my views stated above, particularly
when it involves explanations for what has caused warming, and what has
caused atmospheric CO2 to increase.

Unlike the global marching
army of climate researchers the IPCC has enlisted, we do not walk in
lockstep. We are willing to admit, “we don’t really know”, rather than
mislead people with phrases like, “the warming we see is consistent with
an increase in CO2″, and then have the public think that means, “we
have determined, through our extensive research into all the
possibilities, that the warming cannot be due to anything but CO2″.

Skeptics
advancing alternative explanations (hypotheses) for climate variability
represent the way the researcher community used to operate, before
politics, policy outcomes, and billions of dollars got involved.

Former
NASA physicist Ferenc Miskolczi's new peer-reviewed paper places a
well-deserved death knell on the crumbling greenhouse gas theory of
man-made global warming, stating: "The data negate increase in CO2 in
the atmosphere as a hypothetical cause for the apparently observed
global warming. A hypothesis of significant positive feedback by water
vapor effect on atmospheric infrared absorption is also negated by the
observed measurements. Apparently major revision of the physics
underlying the greenhouse effect is needed."

Miskolczi's analysis
of 61 years of data shows that there has been no change in the infrared
"heat-trapping" ability of IR-active "greenhouse gases" over the
period, in stark contrast to claims of the "greenhouse effect" that
"heat-trapping" should increase in direct relation to the concentration
of "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere. Since the concentration of CO2
has steadily risen over the 61 year period, while the imaginary
"heat-trapping" has not, the theory of anthropogenic global warming is
empirically falsified. From the paper's CONCLUSIONS:

The
greenhouse effect is here monitored without the superfluous
complications of AOGCM climate models. The present method shows directly
whether the global average infrared absorption properties of the
atmosphere are changing or not. In general, if there has been global
warming due to any cause, its possible correlation with infrared
absorption properties of the atmosphere will be directly apparent from
accurate observations assessed by calculations of the absorption
properties. The present results show an apparent warming associated with
no apparent change in the absorption properties. Change in absorption
properties cannot have been the cause of the warming.

The results
show that the theoretical CO2-induced virtual increase in true
greenhouse- gas optical thickness greatly exceeds the actual empirically
measured change over the 61-year dataset. The fact that the virtual
change is about four times the actual change is strong empirical
evidence that there is a very strong dynamic compensation that
stabilizes the atmospheric energy transport process against a potential
perturbation by CO2 change. This means that the empirically estimated
virtual feedback of water vapor effect on the greenhouse-gas optical
thickness is not significantly positive contradicting the IPCC doctrine
of it being strongly positive. It is clear from these data that the
increase in surface temperature shown in Fig. 9 cannot in the least be
accounted for by any effect of CO2 on greenhouse gas optical thickness,
with or without positive feedback by water vapor. Merely empirical
evidence does not necessarily justify predictions of the future: for
them, in addition to empirical evidence, some logical warrant of
generality is needed. Such a warrant of generality is usually called a
physical theory. In order to predict the future, we need a principled
physical theory to explain our empirical observations. The present paper
has restricted its attention to the empirical observational testing of
the quasi-all-sky model, and has avoided theoretical analysis. These
empirical results could well be challenged by a comparable empirical
method.

Miskolczi states that the empirical data do not
support the fundamental tenets of the greenhouse theory and therefore
calls for a "major revision" of the physics of the so-called "greenhouse
effect." Suitable candidates for this "major revision" would be the
Gerlich & Tscheuschner papers and Chilingar et al papers. [Which show the "greenhouse" theory to be contrary to basic physics]

For
the warmists it’s Hail Mary time. The “”unless-we-announce-disasters,
nobody-will-listen” gig has to be taken to a whole new unheard-of level.
The populace is simply much denser than ever imagined. They just aren’t
getting it. It’s not sinking in.

It’s time to bring in the
super special effects. So leave it up to the German Die Welt online to
do that. The normally respectable Die Welt online reports here on
scientists studying the planet Venus and coming to the conclusion that
Earth may end up like her hellish little sister planet, with surface
temperatures of 875°F and atmospheric pressures of 1300 psi (90 times
more than now on earth) and more.

This is not the first time a
media outlet in Europe has ventured out to this extreme. But hey, things
are desperate for the warmists - and especially for their vision of
geopolitical and societal resurfacing. The Die Welt piece starts with
the title and introduction:

Hell Planet Venus Is Not So Different From Earth

875°F and sulphuric acid in the air: A climate of hell reigns on the
planet Venus and scientists are now studying if those conditions are
threatening the Earth.

Die Welt reports on what
scientists said at an international Venus conference in Aussois, France.
They have determined that inhospitable Venus is much more similar to
Earth than previously thought. Yes, be worried, be very worried. Die
Welt writes the scientists believe that:

Venus in
the past may have been very similar to Earth – with oceans – and even
life. Then the climate changed, and the planet turned into red-hot
desolation.

These claims, says Die Welt, are not just
science-fiction fantasy, rather they are based on measurements from the
European Venus Express probe launched in 2005, which is currently
measuring and analysing Venus with an array of high-tech instruments.

Researchers
from the Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research in Lindau and
Germany’s version of NASA are also involved. Even scientists like Colin
Wilson of the University of Oxford thinks it is probable that: "In the
past there had to have been a lot of water on Venus"

Just like Earth. But what really makes Venus interesting, says Die Welt:

—is the fact that it is a prime example of a runaway greenhouse effect
that may have started in a way that is feared to be now taking place on
Earth.

Die Welt describes how things work on Venus:

Due to its thick cloud cover, only 20% of the solar energy reaches
the planet’s surface. This 20%, however, cannot be radiated back into
space because of Venus’s dense atmosphere, and thus leads to enormous
heating of the planet.

Die Welt then adds:

The manmade pollution of the Earth’s atmosphere – warns a majority
of climatologists – could also lead to a runaway situation whose final
result would be what we have on Venus today.

That is: 875°F and an atmospheric pressure over 1300 psi.

Scientists
are interested in finding out if volcanoes could have erupted and
disturbed the atmosphere on Venus early on, and thus led to a runaway
greenhouse effect, The scientists at the conference in Aussois are
trying to determine the cause of resurfacing on Venus.

To
summarise, Die Welt is attempting to get its readers to believe we are
creating a hell on Earth. It doesn’t get more cynical than that.

Meanwhile,
just in the time it took to read this post, hundreds of people died
worldwide because of malnutrition. But governments and the media could
care less of the current, real tragedy, it seems. It’s more important to
go all out and spend billions to cynically concoct new bogus future
scare stories to frighten citizens, and ignore the messy problems of
today.

Journalists and governments need to wake up and get back
to doing what they’re supposed to do. Funding and supporting scientists
in concocting ridiculous scare stories is not one of them. Indeed it’s
willful neglect of the pressing problems we face right now on the planet
today. In Germany this behaviour is a violation of the law and is
called Unterlassene Hilfeleistung (neglect to provide rescue
assistance).

The world is not facing a climate catastrophe.
Instead it’s dead in the middle of a leadership catastrophe. So much so
that one could argue it’s bordering on crime. Voters and consumers,
it’s time to run these bums out-of-town.

This
is of course all nonsense and ignores the real and obvious cause of
high temperatures on Venus: The huge mass of its atmosphere and the
resultant adiabatic (pressure) heating. As one commentator on the
article summarizes it:

If you do the universal gas law
calculation for 90+ atm of gas pressure, you will find that Venus is hot
because of the pressure and not the 98% CO2.

Venus has a
permanent upper level cloud deck which would appear to be a functional
part of a greenhouse, BUT a greenhouse requires that the solar energy
reach the planet’s surface to be converted to IR and re-emitted. This is
not the case as very little light reaches the surface.

In fact,
most of the solar energy is stopped in the cloud deck and some of the IR
emitted towards the lower atmosphere. However, the gas law calculation
shows that this effect is little as the pressure and concentration
(calculated from the density) create almost all of the temperature we
detect.

It is simply impossible for Earth to become anything like
Venus, just as it is impossible for a trace gas (CO2) to drive our
climate (it does not).

Electric cars and the “clean energy” myth

Here
in Las Vegas nine days ago, President Obama made a campaign swing
endorsing U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. A passage in his Friday speech at UNLV
seemed somewhat disconnected from most Americans' current perception of
Washington and what it's doing to our economy.

Mr. Obama intoned:
"As I said on the campaign, and as I've repeated many times as
president, I believe the greatest generator of jobs in America is our
private sector. It's our entrepreneurs and innovators, who are willing
to take a chance on a good idea. ... The private sector -- not
government -- is, was, and always will be the source of America's
economic success. That's why we've cut dozens of taxes for the middle
class and small businesspeople, extended loan programs to put capital in
the hands of startups and worked to reduce the cost of health care for
small businesses."

I conducted an informal survey of Las Vegas
small business owners, last week. Nothing fancy. Owners of some sandwich
joints where I eat, local bookstores, places like that. None could
remember any recent tax cuts or loans or "capital put in their hands" by
Barack Obama or the Democratic Congress. Just the opposite -- they're
puzzled by the persistence of the slowdown, and seriously worried more
tax hikes and government mandates coming down the pike are going to mean
lots more shuttered stores and fewer customers.

Nor could anybody figure out how Mr. Obama has "reduced the cost of health care" for anyone.

"Our
role in government, especially in difficult times like these, is to
break down barriers that are standing in the way of innovation," said
the president. "It's to provide an impetus for businesses to grow and
expand. That ... isn't some abstract theory. We've seen the results."

The
president explained he meant the "clean energy sector -- an industry
that will not only produce the jobs of the future, but help free America
from our dependence on oil in the process. Just yesterday, I took a
tour of Smith Electric Vehicles in Kansas City, Missouri ... a company
that just hired its 50th worker and is on its way to hiring 50 more, and
that's aiming to produce 500 electric vehicles at that plant alone."

The
government "invested" $32 million from the Department of Energy to
cover 30 percent of the cost of creating those jobs, the president
explained.

No, don't bother watching your mailbox for your stock
certificate, guaranteeing you a return on your "investment" should the
U.S. affiliate of Smith Electric Vehicles ever turn a profit. When
politicians use the word "investment," it's more like a holdup man
thanking you for "investing" in his next pipe full of crack.

But if there's money to be made manufacturing and fielding electric vehicles, why is government needed?

Meantime,
let us contemplate the CNW Marketing Research report "Dust to Dust: The
Energy Cost of New Vehicles From Concept to Disposal," which concludes
the gas-guzzling Hummer is more "environmental friendly" than another
familiar electric vehicle, the hybrid electric Prius.

The Prius'
battery contains nickel, you see, which is mined in Ontario, Canada. The
plant that smelts this nickel is nicknamed "the Superstack" because of
the amount of pollution it puts out.

That smelted nickel then has
to travel (via container ship) to Europe to be refined, then to China
to be made into "nickel foam," then to Japan for assembly, and finally
back to the United States. All this shipping costs a great deal, both in
dollars and in pollution.

The study concludes that -- all
production costs taken into account -- the Prius costs about $3.25 per
mile and is expected to last about 100,000 miles, while the Hummer costs
about $1.95 per mile and is expected to last about 300,000 miles.

But
the problem with the "clean energy" miracle of electric vehicles
doesn't end there. When you've run your electric car 60 or 70 miles
(Smith Electric Vehicles claims "up to 100") and need to "plug it in"
for an eight-hour recharge, where does that power come from?

I'm
sorry, did you say "out of the wall"? "From elves in hollow trees"? In
most of this country, that electricity comes from coal-fired or
natural-gas-fired electric power plants. And a fair amount of the energy
sent through the transmission lines to your recharging unit to power
your Giant Golf Cart is lost in transit and in storage, meaning electric
vehicles require the burning of more fossil fuel to power them, not
less.

Meantime, how much do you think the average electric car produced by Smith Motors is going to cost?

In
fact, Smith doesn't make private cars. The firm started in England,
selling low-speed vehicles for government use in locations requiring
zero local emissions, including inside nuclear power plants.

And
the Christian Science Monitor reported on July 8 that while "A
traditional FEDEX-style delivery truck might cost about $50,000, and the
hybrid version about $95,000 ... a plug-in or all-electric version" --
like Smith's -- "could cost $100,000 to $130,000."

To the extent
Smith's vehicles are competitive in England it's because of another
government warping of the market -- the fact that electric trucks can
avoid many of the taxes and fees piled on gasoline and diesel-powered
vehicles, there.

Here
we learn "In the UK, Smith Electric Vehicles qualify for a free Road
Fund Licence, are exempt from the London Congestion Charge, do not
require yearly MOT certificates, have no oil and filter change
requirements and the 'fuel' cost is just £0.04 per mile; over 75 percent
less than the diesel equivalent."

If the pound is now worth about $1.50, that means fuel alone for a diesel truck in England now costs 24 American cents a mile.

Is
that part of the Obama plan to make electric vehicles seem more
"affordable": charging traditional vehicles for "Road Fund Licences,"
city "Congestion Charges," yearly "MOT certificates," and taxing diesel
and gasoline fuel till they cost us 24 cents a mile -- $60 or $80 to
fill a 12-gallon tank?

Among
the various sillinesses that have been proposed to deal with climate
change is the idea that we should start sticking corn or wheat into cars
rather than people. That there are a number of problems with this idea
hasn't stopped politicians in the EU and the US making it mandatory.
Problems like the thought that rising food prices, inevitable under such
a plan, aren't really all that good a thing for those who cannot afford
food now. Or the problem that, as David Pimentel has been shouting for
decades, just as much oil is used raising the crops as is displaced by
the use of the crops.

But the real reason we shouldn't be doing
this is that it doesn't make sense at the most basic level. As the
Congressional Budget Office tells us:

Similarly, the
costs to taxpayers of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the
biofuel tax credits vary by fuel: about $750 per metric ton of CO2e
(that is, per metric ton of greenhouse gases measured in terms of an
equivalent amount of carbon dioxide) for ethanol, about $275 per metric
ton of CO2e for cellulosic ethanol, and about $300 per metric ton of
CO2e for biodiesel. Those estimates do not reflect any emissions of
carbon dioxide that occur when production of biofuels causes forests or
grasslands to be converted to farmland for growing the fuels’ feedstocks
(the raw material for making the fuel). If those emissions were taken
into account, such changes in land use would raise the cost of reducing
emissions and change the relative costs of reducing emissions through
the use of different biofuels—in some cases, by a substantial amount.

The
CBO is as close as we're going to get to a dispassionate and unaligned
analyst on such matters. There's one other number we need to see how
silly the entire idea is though. The Stern Review told us (and yes, we
can all argue about the faults with that Review but let's just take this
official number as a given for the moment, shall we?) that the damage
done by a tonne of CO2-e is $80. So we are paying, at minimum, betweem
$275 and $750 to prevent damage of $80. That is, remember, using all of
the official numbers.

This is known as "making us poorer": that
is, that the policy fails the very cost benefit test that the
politicians themselves have insisted we should be using to determine our
actions. We are told that we must do something about climate change
because the benefits will be higher than the costs of doing so. However,
doing something does not mean that if this is something then this is
what we should do. Courses of action must be weighed by the same process
used to reach the original decision that we should be doing something:
are the benefits greater than the costs?

No, the benefits are not
greater than the costs: and yet the politicians in both places, the EU
and the US, have insisted, mandated, that we should all make ourselves
poorer by doing this profoundly silly thing. Indeed, they force us to
become poorer, even while the decision to make us do so fails the
politicians' own purported decision making guidelines.

It's true
that Nicholas Stern called climate change the largest market failure
ever. But we should remember that the substitute for market failure is
not necessarily competent government. Legislated idiocy is just as, if
not more, likely.

The authors say
"there is growing evidence that climate during the Holocene has been
highly variable, with broad global or hemispheric change, upon which are
superimposed marked regional variability," noting that "this is
certainly the case for mid-latitude Southern Ocean areas such as New
Zealand, where climate responds to atmospheric and oceanic forcing from
polar and sub-tropical regions." However, they report there are few such
real-world records of sub-annual events, such as storms.

What was done

Working
with sediment cores extracted from Lake Tutira on the eastern North
Island of New Zealand, Page et al. developed a 7200-year history of the
frequency and magnitude of storm activity, based on analyses of (1)
sediment grain size, (2) diatom, pollen and spore types and
concentrations, plus (3) carbon and nitrogen concentrations, together
with (4) tephra and radiocarbon dating.

What was learned

The
ten New Zealanders plus one U.S. researcher report that "the average
frequency of all storm layers is one in five years," but that "for storm
layers >= 1.0 cm thick, the average frequency is every 53 years."
And in this regard, they say that over the course of their record,
"there are 25 periods with an increased frequency of large storms," the
onset and cessation of which stormy periods "was usually abrupt,
occurring on an inter-annual to decadal scale." They also note that the
duration of these stormy periods "ranged mainly from several decades to a
century," but that "a few were up to several centuries long," while
"intervals between stormy periods range from about thirty years to a
century." In addition, they find that millennial-scale cooling periods
tend to "coincide with periods of increased storminess in the Tutira
record, while warmer events match less stormy periods."

What it means

Page
et al. write that in today's world there is growing concern -- driven
by climate models -- that there may be abrupt changes in various
short-term meteorological phenomena caused by global warming, "when
either rapid or gradual forces on components of the earth system exceed a
threshold or tipping point." However, as is demonstrated by the results
of their work in the real world, the sudden occurrence of a string of
years -- or even decades -- of unusually large storms is something that
can happen at almost any time on its own, or at least without the
necessity of being driven by human activities such as the burning of
fossil fuels.

British
newspaper, The Sunday Times reveals that the U.S. government has
announced it will stop funding U.K. university at the center of the
Climategate scandal.

The Climate Research Unit, University of
East Anglia (CRU), the hub of the climate controversy over leaked emails
discrediting research into man-made global warming, has been dealt a
heavy blow from a key funding source: the U.S. Department of Energy.

Under
the header, ‘US halts funds for climate unit’ (July 18, 2010) The
Sunday Times report reads, “The American Government has suspended its
funding of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU),
citing the scientific doubts raised by last November’s leak of hundreds
of stolen emails.” (Hat Tip: Barry Woods).

The CRU has been the
primary source of information for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) that world governments had looked to for the science to
substantiate their cap-and-trade green tax policies.

Setback Comes After Official Reviews Give all Clear

The
news is a particular blow for the UEA. The university had been upbeat
in the wake of three British official inquiries which all cleared the
much-maligned CRU of any wrongdoing. However, critics slated each of the
inquiries for alleged whitewashing.

The article continues, “The
US Department of Energy (DoE) was one of the unit’s main sources of
funding for its work assembling a database of global temperatures…”

The
announcement will gravely undermine confidence in climate scientists
hoping for further research funds from the world’s largest funding
source, the U.S. federal government.Scandal Caused Adverse Public Reaction

Ben
Stewart, head of media at Greenpeace, conceded the Climategate scandal
influenced public opinion; “It’s pretty hard to say what the impact has
been but it would be hopelessly naive to say it has not had an effect.”

Public concerns will not be assuaged by recent revelations that Lord Oxburgh’s committee failed to address the actual science.

Official Inquiries Dismissed as ‘Whitewashes’

Despite
independent scientists finding evidence supportive of misconduct, a
Parliamentary hearing and the Oxburgh Inquiry affirmed that researchers
at the CRU were “subjective” and cherry-picked data, but had done no
wrong. Although Lord Oxburgh did conclude that climate researchers were
“poor data handlers” and would benefit by consulting outside
statistical experts.

Dr. John P. Costella, an independent
Australian scientist who studied the leaked emails, took a harsher line
referring to what he found as proof of “shocking misconduct and fraud.”

Dr.
Costella concluded that the “climate science” community was a facade
and that “their vitriolic rebuffs of sensible arguments of mathematics,
statistics, and indeed scientific common sense were not the product of
scientific rigor at all, but merely self-protection at any cost.”

Government Investigators Ignore Key Witness

As
reported on the Climate Audit blog run by McIntyre, Muir Russell review
made no attempt to contact the Canadian who originally filed the
Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests that CRU unlawfully denied over a
three-year period.

Canadian climate analyst, Steve McIntyre had
made a compelling impression on attendees at The Guardian debate on
Climategate in London on Wednesday July 14, 2010.

By contrast,
Phil Jones still looks a broken man despite his immediate reinstatement
to his post upon his recent exoneration. Jones escaped criminal
prosecution only on a technicality according to the UK’s Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO) the agency charged with investigation the
FOIA abuses in the scandal.

Accusations of Official ‘One-sidedness’

But
the official British line appears to have cut no ice with the
Americans. As The Sunday Times adds, “The DoE peer review panel will now
sift through the (Muir Russell) report and decide if American taxpayers
should continue to fund the unit.”

The review carried out by Sir
Muir Russell, also condemned as a whitewash, was notable for the total
absence of any evidence from the principal opposing witness, statistical
expert, McIntyre.

The Sunday Times correspondent asked Trevor
Davis (head of UEA) to confirm whether Phil Jones (head of CRU) attended
a private meeting with Muir Russell in January before the investigating
panel was convened in February. Davis confirmed Jones had met Sir Muir
Russell privately in January.

Climate Scientists Accused of Cherry-picking Data

Skeptics
of the man-made global warming theory point out that police found no
evidence of any theft. They argue that the 1,000+ emails and 62MB of
data that flooded the blogosphere on November 19, 2009 were not stolen
but leaked onto the Internet by a whistleblower within university
research department.

Dr. John P. Costella believes there is
sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that a conspiracy existed
between an inner clique of climatologists seeking to exaggerate the
global historic temperature record.

It is alleged politicized
researchers created the illusion that late 20th century global warming
was potentially catastrophic and attributable to human emissions of
carbon dioxide.

Repercussions for American Climate Researchers?

With
British climate research in a financial pickle attention will turn next
to those U.S. institutions also implicated in climate data shenanigans.

Currently
NASA is facing a legal battle for also refusing to honor FOIA requests
for the past three years. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has
filed a legal challenge against the discredited space agency for also
withholding crucial climate data requested by skeptical climate
analysts.

While in addition, alleged key U.S. ‘climate
conspirator,’ Michael E. Mann is currently in court being pursued for
grant fraud by Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli.

The
NOAA is taking the liberty of declaring 2010 the hottest ever, even
though it’s only July! So what’s all the hurry? Well, you have to get
them scary global-hotting headlines out while you can, and any way you
can. When you’re desperate - you’re desperate.

They’ve seen
their own forecasts for the rest of the year, and so they know it’s
their last chance. Just check the leading climatic indicators on my
homepage and you’ll see why.

Now on Arctic sea ice, allow me to
use the same NOAA “scientific” method and declare that the Arctic has
experienced the slowest July ice melt ever! (Well, at least so far).

Look at the ice melts from June 30 – July 15 for the following years, taken from AMSR-E.

Never
has ice melted so slowly in mid summer as it has this year. Indeed sea
ice melt in July 2010 is less than half the melt rate in 2007. It’s far
below anything we’ve seen on record. Would the NOAA already call it a
record low melt for the month?

And as Lubos Motl pointed out 3
days ago here, total global sea ice is above normal. Also see here.
Indeed sea ice is rebounding, and surprisingly just at a time when it’s
supposively the “hottest ever”. Someone is wrong, obviously.

People
who are sceptical of climate change could soon be facing criminal
charges in the European Court of Justice, British National Party leader
and MEP Nick Griffin MEP has said.

Speaking in an exclusive Radio
Red, White and Blue interview on this week’s “Eurofile” report, Mr
Griffin told interviewer John Walker about a recent sitting of the
European Parliament’s subcommittee dealing with the matter, which had
passed a ruling which in effect placed legal sanction against anyone who
dared question the origin, cause or effect of “climate change.”

Mr
Griffin revealed how he could not get a straight answer out of the
committee while it was in session, but that afterwards it was admitted
to him that that intention of the rule was to criminalise dissension on
the topic of “climate change.”

Listen to the full Radio RWB
report by clicking here, choosing the RWB player launch icon and
clicking on “Nick Griffin 14 July Brussels” in the pop-up menu.

This
VERY skeptical article by Joseph A Olson first appeared a year ago but
has lost no relevance in the meantime (unlike the endless false
prophecies of the Warmists)

The accuracy of any future
prediction is limited to the completeness of the current understanding,
which is based on empirical measurements. You may sense hot and cold but
until the invention of the thermometer you could not quantify
temperature. The same with the hydrometer for relative humidity,
barometer for atmospheric pressure and anemometer for wind speed. As
these instruments gained wider distribution there was an ever-increasing
database to establish trend lines.

Physical Climatology, written
in 1941 is considered to be the origins of this branch of science.
Based solely on its predictive powers, this is far from perfected
science. Realizing that less than a century of measurements from very
limited regions of the Earth might be limiting their accuracy, a new
branch was added called Paleoclimatology. There has been exponential
growth in information on these new branches of science in the last few
decades.

It is not internecine snobbery to mention the
shortcomings of these new branches of science. Engineers had no method
of calculating multi-bay, multi-story structural loads until the 1920’s
and could not do three-dimensional analysis until the dawn of the
computer age. It was the 1980’s before there were accurate calculation
methods for seismic loads. We have all benefited from this information
super highway.

To extend knowledge of past events beyond the
limits of actual measurements, Earth scientists developed a range of
proxy measurements. But every proxy has an unknown correction factor.
Consider the use of tree growth rings as a proxy measurement of past
precipitation. The actual tree ring growth is the measure of the total
of all environmental factors. If volcanic ash limited sunshine, if
volcanic particulates deposited harmful chemicals, if pest or disease
were prevalent during the growth cycle, then the size of growth rings is
not a direct indication of precipitation. Years with sudden, intense
rainfall might actually have higher levels than years with more even
distribution.

Without complete and accurate information all math
models rapidly compound the errors and result in hopelessly incorrect
future projections. The folly of the Warmist movement is that carbon
dioxide is a primary climate factor and that the tiny portion of
proposed reductions in the human emitted gas would have a measurable
effect. Had the planet’s climate been stable for millions of years and
there was a measurable link of temperature and atmospheric CO2 then
there could be AGW plausibility. Such is not the case.

Humanity
suffers from a greatly exaggerated sense of self-importance. While we
can have minor impact on the environment and species extinction, it is
nature that holds all of the trump cards in environment game. In his
excellent book, Underworld, author, Graham Hancock documents literate,
but due to our inability to translate, societies that are still labeled
as prehistoric. The very real climate change that those ancestors faced
would earn scorn for today’s Warmists. Plato’s tale of Atlantis and
Noah’s struggle with a flood were very real events just now being
proven.

Too numerous to list or detail in a single article, it is
worth noting just a few of the geologic events which occurred
independent of man or atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The Warmist
could gain credibility if they could explain the Younger Dryas (the
younger of three events), the Flandarian Transgression, the Dalton
Minimum or the Malankovitch cycle. All of the events occurred in the
last 400,000 years and are captured in Greenland and Antarctica ice core
gases so touted by the AGW movement.

The Last Glacial Maximum
lasted for 100,000 years and most of the northern and southern
hemispheres were covered in thousands of feet of ice. Ocean levels were
400 feet lower than today. Then 21,000 years ago these huge masses began
to suddenly melt, then refreeze, then melt, then refreeze. The final
freeze, the Younger Dryas, began approximately 13,000 years ago. The
final violent thaw began 11,000 years ago. Coincidently 90% of all large
North American mammals disappeared at this time.

What we
consider ‘terra firma’ is in fact more like a molten rock pudding with a
thin plastic crust. The Ice Age overburden from up to 3.5 kilometers of
ice deformed this crust. As the ice melted huge pools of water formed
on top of and below the ice caps. At some point these trapped oceans of
ice melt began to flow. Underworld then describes what happened:

“…as
a glacial wave proceeded across an ice sheet…it could have attained
heights of 600 meters and a cross sectional breadth of as much as 40
kilometers, and a forward speed of several hundred kilometers per hour.”

Suddenly
relieved of over burden the Earth’s crust rebounded, fracturing the
remaining ice cap and sending the even larger volumes of underlying ice
melt and mountain sized glacial chunks to the sea. The entire Earth
would have been racked with tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions, all while oceans rose in meters almost instantly. While there
were humans around to witness these events, there is no evidence that
they in any way caused these or any of the numerous other major climate
changes.

The LGM did not end as a result of massive carbon
dioxide build up. Nor did the LGM end from massive increase of solar
radiation from a 100,000 year long dormancy to a new 12,000 year long
period of slightly higher relative stability. There must be an enormous
Earth force which is always present, but subject to periodic and
dramatic shifts in output.

Like planetary crime scene
investigators we now know what did not cause this repeated shift,
evidence is everywhere, and the suspect is still at the scene.
Geo-nuclear has the opportunity but does it act randomly and alone. It
is possible that cosmic rays, neutrino bombardment, planetary
alignments, gravity waves or galactic radiation could all have a role in
triggering Geo-nuclear reactions. Once again we are limited by
empirical data from anything but speculation.

The Inter
GOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change has given itself jurisdiction over
world climate. Let’s see. A government panel of largely undeveloped
nations is to decide if there needs to be additional government agencies
funded by carbon use tax on only the developed nations. With that
directive, the studies funded by the IPCC are predictable. The UN is
hardly the oracle of objectivity.

‘Deniers’ are dismissed as
energy industry paid hacks, when few have any links. Meanwhile the
Warmist conflicts are everywhere. GE produces windmills, owns NBC who
promotes AGW and its political supporters, who in turn direct government
contracts to GE. A great article on these hidden economic forces is The
Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi in the July issue of
Rolling Stone. The great carbon power point pimp Gore has Jezebel Nobel
on one arm and Oscarina, the Hollywood Harlot on the other. These are a
most unworthy set of champions for any cause.

“You don’t need a
weatherman to tell which way the wind blows” according to Bob Dylan. You
don’t need a PhD to read the writing on the wall. If you gathered the
worlds greatest experts on tile chips you could get endless reports on
the base clays, the ceramic coatings and information on the firing
methods and none would notice the mosaic. With each new chip the AGW
mosaic is getting clearer.

As knowledge continues to increase
exponentially we may soon have many more answers. We may reach the
scientific harmonic convergence when all scientifically grounded
Warmists will be converted. Those adherents with hatred for humanity or
capitalism will await the next society-bashing trend. The elitists who
envisioned this scam will surely have a fall back bubble-blowing
position.

Our supreme leader flippantly dismissed questions on
massive cap and trade tax increases with the phrase “Everyone is going
to have skin in the game”. That can only mean one thing. We are all
going to be skinned. If passed by the Senate, then the Waxman-Markey
Bill will gladly distribute our fleeced skin to the moneychangers in the
temple.

The Holocene (last 11,000 years) have been a wonderful
time for humanity. That it will end is a certainty. That the end will be
a violent climatic change with enormous challenges for all living
things is also certain. That humans will cause global warming in
defiance of the next pending Ice Age…what is that artificially colored
sugar water that you are drinking?

I
wrote yesterday of intellectual fashions. The article below would seem
to have identified what might be called an intellectual super-fashion:
Belief in a "universal panacea of high intelligence" (or perhaps the
infallibility of high education)

The Obama administration
takes great pride in Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, because
Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. In physics, too, which is a real science that
has something to do with energy. Sort of. And he's Chinese, one of the
oppressed people of color, and he's an immigrant whose papers are in
order.

That's 3.5 gold stars in ObamaWorld.

Chu's research
showed how to push around individual atoms with laser beams. Amazing
stuff. But Nobel winners are not necessarily good at fixing oil leaks,
as we have seen.

I don't know if Dr. Chu plays the fiddle like
Fibonacci, or if he is a trained ballet dancer like Rahm Emanuel, or if
he does brain surgery on the side. Whatever Dr. Chu's many talents may
be, he doesn't know how to solve that oil leak.

When Saddam
Hussein blew up hundreds of oil wells in Kuwait in 1992, George Bush #41
sent in Red Adair from Texas. Kuwait's burning oil wells got fixed. The
media lost a big story, and the Left, which was all ready to accuse
Bush # 41 of a planetary crime for making Saddam blow up all those oil
wells, lost a big agitprop opportunity. They had to wait for Bush # 43
to work off their spleen.

The weirdness is that during the months
of oil gushing from the BP leak, Obama and his spokesnoid Robert Gibbs
kept reminding the world that Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. That plus five
bucks will buy you a Starbucks French Roast on the Gulf Coast, right
where you can watch the sunset reflecting off the oil slick. It's really
pretty, and as some Obamanoid was saying the other day, if Louisiasans
were smart, they would turn it into a tourist attraction. Fortunately,
it looks like the oil leak has been plugged, and all that oil will be
metabolized by the ocean in due course.

But the Leftist
superstition about Harvard SmartCream will keep haunting us for years.
The reason is that no matter what the emergency may be, the instinct of
this White House is to apply the same panacea. Put some SmartCream on
that, and it'll be fixed. Or at least it will look as if we are Doing
Something.

Obama's adoring fans seem to share the superstitious
belief that intelligence is a kind of oil slick that you just discover
in places like Harvard and Yale. Take a problem, any problem -- global
warming, the U.S. economy, race, and gender-baiting -- and smear it
liberally with SmartCream from Larry Summers or Elena Kagan -- and
behold! The answer pops out, just like that. It's amazing. For you, it's
only $ 9.95, 'cause I like your face. Can't you see Obama selling that
line on an informercial with his great photogenic smile?

This
superstition about a universal panacea of high intelligence seems to be
really widespread on the Left. Jozef Stalin used to lecture academic
audiences on the topic of linguistics, even before Noam Chomsky
transformed the base metal of syntax into the gold of leftist
opportunism. Why does the world listen to Chomsky's radical politics?
Because he is reputed to be a great linguist. It doesn't work for me,
but apparently for millions of people it looks like logic.

This
is so much like Anton Mesmer (the first "mesmerist") back in 1770 or
so, who used to cure his medical patients by sweeping a long magnetic
iron rod over their bodies. Poor people stood in line for a chance to
sit around a magnetized tub of water with iron handles sticking out,
just like socialized medicine. It all worked like a charm, because
everybody knew that animal magnetism spread its healing rays wherever it
touched your body.

Animal magnetism worked fine for Anton Mesmer
in 1770. It still works, along with crystal therapy and pyramids for
keeping your razor blades sharp. Ask just about anybody in Berkeley,
California.

Don't knock the great con artists of history, because
the media world is still doing the same thing today. What do you think
the global warming scam is about? It is a mass hysteria stirred up by
the media to make money without having to actually work, or to learn
anything -- along with almost universal ignorance and superstition, also
spread by the media and the education establishment -- plus deep
corruption in Big Money Science.

In the U.K., the Labour
Government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown practically had group hugs
imagining how much the global warming rainbow would pay off -- they were
officially demanding trillions of dollars -- so they pushed it and
pushed it for decades using their poodle scientists at Hadley CRU, and
their lapdog droids like the BBC and the Guardian.

In fact, the
Guardian still believes in global warming today, but then they believed
Stalin's lies for thirty years, followed by Mao and Pol Pot, and today,
Gorbachev. For all I know, they still believe in Stalin's phony
agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, who made all the real scientists in the
Soviet Union applaud his scientific fantasy life on pain of exile in
Siberia. Or a bullet to the head -- take your pick.

We are much
too civilized to threaten scientists with execution or exile to Alaska,
where they might run into the Palins and go native. We just give them
millions of dollars if they sing along with the Party Line. And it
works! They chime right in, and sometimes they even do a little dance.

That's how you earn credibility, buddy, and don't you forget it.

The
Left is infinitely gullible, but they also spread gullibility in the
schools. In the Clinton years, Al Gore had a hand in appointing NASA's
witch doctor, James Hansen, the guy who wants warming skeptics to be
thrown in jail "for crimes against humanity and nature." That just shows
you world-caliber science at work. Where's Hansen's Nobel Prize? Why
should Algore get one, and Barry the 0, but not James Hansen, who makes
up all the climate videogames?

When it all fell apart in
Copenhagen last year, Tony Blair showed up on TV telling us with his
million-dollar smile that it didn't matter if global warming was true or
not. There's your public confession of guilt, when politicians tell you
that it's still a global emergency and yes, they still need
astronomical new taxes from five billion people even if it doesn't
happen to be true. Hold onto your wallet. Right now Tony is working for
Muammar Khadaffi of Lybia, 'cause that's where the money is.

The
media fall for this Dr. Science gag because they never read anything
about real science. They're much too busy thinking up tomorrow's phony
headlines. But even if they were literate they still would go on the
belief that their audiences are mostly suckers. The mantra that "Obama
is soooo smart" is supposed to shut them up and keep 'em voting
Democrat. No proof is ever needed.

I'm not saying the media are
wrong about their audiences. It works, as you can see right in front of
your eyes. It's just that the audiences are complicit in the con job.
The TV-watchers and newspaper-readers have dumbed themselves down. Every
day they engage in willing suspension of disbelief, like kids listening
to Santa Claus or good Soviet citizens in the Evil Empire.

In
fact, Obama does keep telling them he is Santa Claus, and all his free
goodies come out of that stash he keeps in the White House. The same
liberals who fall for all other con jobs keep the Demagogues in power --
media scams like imaginary energy shortages, No Nukes campaigns, clean
government in Detroit and Chicago, feminist malarkey, ObamaCare, and
any conceivable qualifications Elena Kagan might have for the Supreme
Court.

Ignorance can be cured with education; but self-imposed
ignorance has no cure. It just rots your brain until you die from Donald
Berwick Disease. If you don't know what Donald Berwick Disease is, you
will -- you will, very soon.

I know highly educated folk who are
so stuck at age 22 that they will never reach adulthood. You can find
them all over the campuses, where scruffy hippies gather in little cafés
to tell each other lies.

A month ago, forty-two members of the
British Royal Society finally worked up enough integrity to protest the
abject mendacity of Global Frauding. The Royal Society then withdrew its
public support for the scam. Scientific societies around the world have
fallen for it, either because they took somebody's word for it (and
they know that scientists never tell a lie), or because they were bought
off. But the Royal Society -- founded by Isaac Newton -- sacrificed
four centuries of integrity for one big payoff. And now they've lost
it. It couldn't happen to a more deserving crowd.

The Brits
pioneered global warming. Before GW there was Mad Cow, a huge public
health fraud that was based on unsupported computer modeling in the
United Kingdom -- which should sound familiar. If you assume that prion
infections like Mad Cow spread on an accelerating curve, just like the
infamous global warming hockey stick, you can show that everybody is
going to die tomorrow, or next week at the latest, based on a perfectly
good math model that just happens to be totally wrong. It is the worst
of GIGO disease, really primitive thinking, but it's good enough to
swing a ton of money for the people who promoted it.

In the
upshot, the formerly sane nation of Britain went Banana Republic over
Mad Cow Disease, as propagated by the intellectual giants of Fleet
Street. That's where the newspapers used to be located, right near the
busiest pubs in the world. Take a deep breath in Fleet Street and you're
drunk. News reporting used to be the professional disease of British
alcoholics. Think of Chris Hitchens and you get the idea.

In any
case, Mad Cow guaranteed a decade of scare headlines for the denizens of
Fleet Street so they didn't even have to work. A whole generation of
journos died of the DTs before somebody found out that no actual people
were getting Mad Cow disease, and indeed, that mighty few cows were
getting it, either.

Basically, they destroyed millions of cattle
on the raw assumption that they might get sick someday. It was a purely
imaginary epidemic; most mass hysterias are. If you kill the cattle
before they get the disease, you can never find out if your math model
was wrong. If you demand your trillions of bucks before global warming
ever happens, there's no way to prove you are wrong. Right now, the
scammers are recovering all their old power and prestige, because the
last ten years of actual cooling is just covering up the trend toward
the world coming to an end. They say. And by gum, they've got the
computer models to prove it! They still want all that money, and they
are still getting it. Phil Jones and Michael Mann haven't been fired, or
even embarrassed in public. They still have their jobs, and they're
looking forward to running another pricey scam sometime soon.

Across
the Channel from London, the French never fell for Mad Cow, so millions
of happy eaters kept chomping down on delicious sheep brains in
wonderful wine sauces and finally died of gourmet ecstasy. The French
got their meat cheap from British farmers who were forced to kill their
cattle, or maybe to sell them for a few euros before the animal
inspectors turned up. At the end, a total of about a hundred people were
said to have died from Mad Cow over a dozen years, which is
statistically right around zero. Given the integrity of the folks who
spread the scam, I would not be surprised to find out that Mad Cow
Disease record-keeping was strangely intermittent, amazingly like the
CRU Hadley Climate records, the Russian meterology bureau, NASA, and
NOAA. None of those scientific Holy of Holies seem to have kept their
data, and they're not showing us their computer programs.

During
Mad Cow days, the socialist Labour Government paid British farmers to
destroy their cattle. The British taxpayers were subsidizing French
cuisine, and the chefs were laughing all the way to their mistresses'
mattresses, where they traditionally keep their money. Those crazy
Brits!

Britain used to do world-class science, but socialism
corrupts everything, because everything becomes politicized. Previous
generations of scientists would be ashamed of the level of corruption in
Britain, but these characters just keep coming. Today, socialist
politicians have conquered science in Europe, as in Hitler's Germany and
Stalin's Russia. The EU itself has never passed a financial audit in
its fourteen years of existence, and it doesn't care to pass the next
one. Nobody in the world can make them. They are the bosses, just as
surely as the Soviet apparatchiks. So they don't bother with audits.
It's like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Who's going to make them?

Historically,
corrupt science kills people. It did so with AIDS (which the media lied
about for years as a heterosexual disease) and with Saint Rachel Carson
depriving Africa of DDT insecticide, thereby hurting tens of millions
of African children but doing a lot of good for the tsetse fly. Then
there is the abject Western surrender to street drugs, with the media
and politicians constantly talking about getting it all legalized, in
spite of the victims who show up at emergency rooms every day around the
country -- especially teenagers and minorities, as it turns out. When
lies are propagated as truths, and science colludes with the lies,
people get hurt.

It's sad, but on the other hand, scientific
corruption is a self-imposed disease. Scientists have an intellectual
and moral duty to think skeptically and to demand evidence. When they
fail to meet their most basic obligations over many years, that is not
an accident.

Why was there only a small coterie of heroic global
warming skeptics who demanded to see the original data? In science, that
should be a standard practice -- but now that scientific institutions,
including universities, have been proven to be much less trustworthy
than your local drugstore, it's mighty strange that there is no movement
afoot for all climate data to be put on the web, as a routine
precaution against fraud and cherry-picking. Where's the outrage? It's
exactly where it was during the Clinton years in D.C. In a Leftist
Political Machine, public outrage never gets a hearing.

That
kind of scientific ignorance is willful. It is a moral disease, not a
mistake. Scientific institutions could purge their crooks any day they
want. But they don't do that -- and that leaves us to draw our own
conclusions, doesn't it?

Dr. Chu is not so unusual in a world of
global warmists and Mad Cow chasers. I don't know the man, and I can't
read his mind, but either he is not as smart as he's cracked up to be,
or...

I put this up on EDUCATION WATCH yesterday but I think it has a place here too

Top
state officials in Maryland are promoting a plan that would make the
study of environmental education a requirement for all students to
graduate from the state’s public high schools.

The proposal,
which will be made available for public comment beginning today, is set
for final consideration by the state board of education in the fall. If
adopted, it would represent the first time a state has added a high
school graduation requirement focused on environmental literacy,
according to Donald R. Baugh, the vice president for education at the
Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Annapolis, Md.,
that has been a strong champion of the measure.

“This is one step
toward what we hope will be a stronger, more comprehensive effort in
Maryland” to provide environmental education, said Mr. Baugh. “What we
really like about the high school graduation [requirement is that] it’s
for all students, it is a systemic solution.”

Nancy S. Grasmick,
the state superintendent of schools, said the proposal—which still is
subject to change before being taken up by the state board—enjoys
widespread support among local superintendents in Maryland, and also is
backed by Gov. Martin O’Malley.

She emphasized that the proposal
would not mandate that students take a particular course, but instead
would call on school districts to ensure that environmental literacy is
“threaded through” the curriculum. “I think it has much more importance
because it isn’t just, ‘Take one course, and that’s all you have to
do,’” Ms. Grasmick said in an interview.

The Maryland initiative
comes as advocates for environmental education are continuing a push to
enact new federal legislation to advance the issue. Their goal is for
companion bills introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, which would
authorize $500 million over five years for environmental education, to
be included in the overdue reauthorization of the federal Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, Mr. Baugh said.Districts Have Leeway

The
new Maryland proposal stems from the work of a task force created by
Gov. O’Malley, a Democrat. The task force, called the Maryland
Partnership for Children in Nature, was co-chaired by Ms. Grasmick and
John R. Griffin, the secretary of the state Department of Natural
Resources. In April 2009, the panel issued a final report and
recommendations to the governor, including the call for a new graduation
requirement on environmental literacy.

However, the task force
had actually recommended requiring that all high school students take a
specific course on environmental literacy, while the proposal moving
forward calls for the topic to be “infused” into current curricular
offerings.

To be sure, observers say, environmental education is
nothing new in Maryland, and many schools have long included
environmental literacy in the curriculum.

In fact, this would not
be the state’s first mandate pegged to environmental education. The
Maryland education code in 1989 was first amended to require a
“comprehensive, multi-disciplinary program of environmental education
within current curricular offerings at least once in the early, middle,
and high school learning years.”

But Mr. Baugh, from the
Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said that implementation has never reached
all schools, especially following the enactment of the No Child Left
Behind Act, the current version of the ESEA, with its emphasis on
improving student achievement in reading and mathematics.

He also
argues that the earlier measure required local systems simply to
include environmental education within their instructional programs, but
did not stipulate that all students must participate.

“A
requirement tied to the ability for students to graduate high school
will apply to all Maryland students, and carries greater weight and
significance,” he said.

He added that the proposed new
requirement also “provides much greater guidance regarding appropriate
high school instruction and requires school systems to provide
professional development for teachers to assist them in meeting the
requirement.”

At the same time, Mr. Baugh said the proposal gives
districts considerable leeway in how they choose to bring environmental
education into classrooms.

Kevin M. Maxwell, the superintendent
of the 75,500-student Anne Arundel County Public Schools, said he
welcomes the proposed requirement. “We have an obligation to make sure
that we equip our next generation with the tools they’re going to need
... to, quite frankly, clean up the messes that we’ve made,” he said,
“and to make sure the Earth is a sustainable home for the people who
inhabit it.”

Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause, says Jonathan Kay

I
would be more inclined to say that conservatives who believe in Leftist
propaganda are a liability to the conservative cause, which is where
Jonathan Kay fits in. I don't have the time or inclination to fisk the
nonsense below fully but I do add a few comments at the foot of it

Have
you heard about the “growing number” of eminent scientists who reject
the theory that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the earth’s
temperature? It’s one of those factoids that, for years, has been
casually dropped into the opening paragraphs of conservative manifestos
against climate-change treaties and legislation. A web site maintained
by the office of a U.S. Senator has for years [external link] instructed
us that a “growing number of scientists” are becoming climate-change
“skeptics.” This year, the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation gave a [external link] speech praising the “growing number
of distinguished scientists [who are] challenging the conventional
wisdom with alternative theories and peer reviewed research.” In this
newspaper, a columnist recently described the “growing skepticism about
the theory of man-made climate change.” Surely, the conventional wisdom
is on the cusp of being overthrown entirely: Another colleague
proclaimed that we are approaching “the church of global warming’s
Galileo moment.”

Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense.
In a new [external link] article published in the Proceedings of the
Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford
University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a
statistical breakdown of the opinions of the world’s most prominent
climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the
evidence of man-made global warming “comprises only 2% of the top 50
climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate
publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top
200, excluding researchers present in both groups … This result closely
agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of
self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the
tenets of [man-made global warming].”

How has this tiny 2-3%
sliver of fringe opinion been reinvented as a perpetually “growing”
share of the scientific community? Most climate-change deniers (or
“skeptics,” or whatever term one prefers) tend to inhabit militantly
right-wing blogs and other Internet echo chambers populated entirely by
other deniers. In these electronic enclaves — where a smattering of
citations to legitimate scientific authorities typically is larded up
with heaps of add-on commentary from pundits, economists and YouTube
jesters who haven’t any formal training in climate sciences — it becomes
easy to swallow the fallacy that the whole world, including the
respected scientific community, is jumping on the denier bandwagon.

This
is a phenomenon that should worry not only environmentalists, but also
conservatives themselves: The conviction that global warming is some
sort of giant intellectual fraud now has become a leading bullet point
within mainstream North American conservatism; and so has come to bathe
the whole movement in its increasingly crankish, conspiratorial glow.

Conservatives
often pride themselves on their hard-headed approach to public-policy —
in contradistinction to liberals, who generally are typecast as
fuzzy-headed utopians. Yet when it comes to climate change, many
conservatives I know will assign credibility to any stray piece of junk
science that lands in their inbox … so long as it happens to support
their own desired conclusion. (One conservative columnist I know formed
her skeptical views on global warming based on testimonials she heard
from novelist Michael Crichton.) The result is farcical: Impressionable
conservatives who lack the numeracy skills to perform long division or
balance their checkbooks feel entitled to spew elaborate proofs
purporting to demonstrate how global warming is in fact caused by
sunspots or flatulent farm animals. Or they will go on at great length
about how “climategate” has exposed the whole global-warming phenomenon
as a charade — despite the fact that a subsequent investigation
[external link] exculpated research investigators from the charge that
they had suppressed temperature data. (In fact, “climategate” was
overhyped from the beginning, since the scientific community always had
other historical temperature data sets at its disposal — that maintained
by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, most notably — entirely
independent of the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East
Anglia, where the controversy emerged.)

Let me be clear:
Climate-change denialism does not comprise a conspiracy theory, per se:
Those aforementioned 2% of eminent scientists prove as much. I
personally know several denialists whom I generally consider to be
intelligent and thoughtful. But the most militant denialists do share
with conspiracists many of the same habits of mind. Oxford University
scholar Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley of Washington University have
defined conspiracy theories as those worldviews that trace important
events to a secretive, nefarious cabal; and whose proponents
consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their
hypothesis, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider
circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of
society. This describes, more or less, how radicalized warming deniers
treat the subject of their obsession: They see global warming as a
Luddite plot hatched by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Al Gore to
destroy industrial society. And whenever some politician, celebrity or
international organization expresses support for the all-but-unanimous
view of the world’s scientific community, they inevitably will respond
with a variation of “Ah, so they’ve gotten to them, too.”

In
support of this paranoid approach, the denialists typically will rely on
stray bits of discordant information — an incorrect reference in a UN
report, a suspicious-seeming “climategate” email, some hypocrisy or
other from a bien-pensant NGO type — to argue that the whole theory is
an intellectual house of cards. In these cases, one can’t help but be
reminded of the folks who point out the fluttering American flag in the
moon-landing photos, or the “umbrella man” from the Zapruder film of
JFK’s assassination.

In part, blame for all this lies with the
Internet, whose blog-from-the-hip ethos has convinced legions of pundits
that their view on highly technical matters counts as much as
peer-reviewed scientific literature. But there is something deeper at
play, too — a basic psychological instinct that public-policy scholars
refer to as the “cultural cognition thesis,” described in a recently
published academic [external link] paper as the observed principle that
“individuals tend to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce
one or another idealized vision of how society should be organized …
Thus, generally speaking, persons who subscribe to individualistic
values tend to dismiss claims of environmental risks, because acceptance
of such claims implies the need to regulate markets, commerce and other
outlets for individual strivings.”

In simpler words, too many of
us treat science as subjective — something we customize to reduce
cognitive dissonance between what we think and how we live.

In
the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for
many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the
idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling
consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal
fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis
challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally.

The
appropriate intellectual response to that challenge — finding a way to
balance human consumption with responsible environmental stewardship —
is complicated and difficult. It will require developing new
technologies, balancing carbon-abatement programs against other (more
cost-effective) life-saving projects such as disease-prevention, and —
yes — possibly increasing the economic cost of carbon-fuel usage through
some form of direct or indirect taxation. It is one of the most
important debates of our time. Yet many conservatives have made
themselves irrelevant in it by simply cupping their hands over their
ears and screaming out imprecations against Al Gore.

Rants and
slogans may help conservatives deal with the emotional problem of
cognitive dissonance. But they aren’t the building blocks of a serious
ideological movement. And the impulse toward denialism must be fought if
conservatism is to prosper in a century when environmental issues will
assume an ever greater profile on this increasingly hot, parched,
crowded planet. Otherwise, the movement will come to be defined — and
discredited — by its noisiest cranks and conspiracists.

Kay's starting point is that he takes seriously the sloppy and irrelevant propaganda put out by the "group of scholars from Stanford University". He is obviously completely oblivious to the barrage of criticisms that study has attracted. He could start reading here on that. The study concerned in fact echoes the work of the notorious Naomi Oreskes. See here and here for more on that.

Underlying
Kay's faith in the Oreskes-type work, however, is a sort of naive
trust. He is either completely oblivious of "the madness of crowds" or
thinks that scientists are not affected by it. He quite rightly
dismisses the idea that the very widespread support for global warming
could be a "worldwide conspiracy" but overlooks something even more
influential than any conspiracy could be: intellectual fashions.

It
would be tedious to attempt a list of intellectual fashions that have
been both very influential and yet totally wrong so let me give just one
example from a field totally outside climate science: The belief that a
low-fat diet is good for you. That belief is even more widespread than
belief in global warming. You can hardly pick up a newspaper without
being bombarded by it. Yet it is totally wrong. See the sidebar of my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog for much documentation of that.

Just
one example: What was meant to be the solid gold proof of the evils of
fat attracted $400 million of funding from the U.S. government and the
resultant study was indeed done with great care over a long period --
but when the findings were released in 2006, the result was that high or
low fat consumption in fact made absolutely no difference to key health
outcomes. See e.g. here.
Yet the evils of fat are still to this day almost universally accepted
both among medical scientists and everyone else. It's a sad comment on
the human love of attractive simplifications but it should also
undermine the trusting nature of Mr. Kay. Consensus is no proof of
anything and Bertrand Russell probably had a point when he said that
consensus was more likely to be disproof than proof of whatever it
asserted

Although
the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act (APA) appears dead, Senator Reid
announced he will introduce, yet, another version of cap-and-tax this
month by any other name. But both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
and EPA have produced studies showing that cap-and-tax will be
economically harmful. The CBO report is a solid, prudent review of three
studies: Resources for the Future, Brookings Institution, and CRA
International. All report that significant declines in total employment
will result from APA. Strangely, Brookings makes the unrealistic
assumption that all nations, including China, India, and Brazil, will
adopt carbon dioxide control measures even if the US does not.

In
spite of its harmful consequences, with the worst year-long
unemployment rate since 1982, cap-and-tax continues to reappear. To
understand why, it is useful to further examine APA to grasp the
financial incentives involved. Most macroeconomic studies (economy-wide)
do not examine the incidence of the tax (who actually pays the tax)
and, correspondingly, the incidence of the subsidy (who reaps the
benefits). A study by Chamberlain Economics does:

APA
establishes allowances for carbon dioxide emissions which decline every
year. Part is sold at auction to establish a controlled range of prices
and part is distributed free to favored industries that can be sold or
traded, ideally within the controlled range of prices. Using the mean of
estimated prices in APA, Chamberlain Economics estimates the value of
the of the part distributed free during the 2013 to 2034 life of the
program as $2.1 Trillion – about the amount of total Federal revenues in
2009. The largest beneficiary is the electricity industry to the tune
of $870 Billion.

Politicians claim the value of the free
allowances to the electricity industry will then flow to the consumers
of electricity. Chamberlain uses established microeconomic theory backed
by empirical studies to show that much of the value will flow to the
shareholders of the companies that are generally in the highest income
group. Thus, the entire scheme results in a massive transfer of wealth
from the lower and middle income groups to the wealthy. No wonder Duke
Energy declared cap-and-trade will give share holders a $1,000,000,000
(Billion Dollar) profit.

Very interestingly, the Carbon Capture
and Storage (CCS) industry, basically non-existent with an unproven
technology, receives $246 Billion in free allowances – twice the 2009
budget for California. Given the sheer volume of carbon dioxide
involved, it is highly unlikely that CCS will ever become viable.

[As
a side note, Lord Oxburgh, the chairman of the third “independent”
British commission investigating Climategate, is also honorary president
of the British Carbon Capture and Storage Association. (See here)]

Using
EPA numbers and established models from government agencies such as the
U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics, Chamberlain estimates the
cap-and-trade decline in employment would be 716,000 by 2020 and 5.1
million by 2050. The estimated decline in wages would be $32 Billion by
2020 and $236 Billion by 2050.

Unlike far too many studies of
this type, the authors recognize that these estimates have great
uncertainty and can only be considered as orders-of -magnitude
approximations rather than precise estimates.

*******************************************

BP
has successfully placed a cap on the gushing oil well, stopping the
flow of oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico. The drilling of
relief wells to permanently seal the damaged well is proceeding. That is
the good news from the Gulf. The disturbing news is the actions of the
Federal Government. Various sources report that, due to the heat, the
work rules for Gulf clean up are 20 minutes of work followed by a 40
minute break. If correct, this would outrage veterans of Iraq or Vietnam
for the lack of a sense of urgency to accomplish the mission.

In
spite of being twice thwarted by the courts, the Interior Department
has announced yet another moratorium on drilling wells in waters deeper
than 500 feet below sea level and reports indicate it is not issuing
permits for shallower wells. These actions have economic consequences
for the region and the nation. Already two shallow water drilling rigs
have left and two deep water drilling rigs are leaving: one for Egypt
and the other for the Republic of the Congo. It is sad to think that the
owners of the rigs believe that the government of the Republic of Congo
is less inclined to interfere with obligations of contract than the
government of the United States.

The Number of the Week is 400:
The number of wild Canada geese rounded up from Prospect Park in
Brooklyn and killed by the Agriculture Department on one day. (See 400
Park Geese Die, below). On day 86 of the BP oil spill, the US Fish and
Wildlife reports the total number of birds collected dead with visible
oil for the entire period is 746 (8.7 per day) and sea turtles total 14. (Visible oil does not mean cause.)

*******************************************

Book Of The Week: Over the past two weeks TWTW carried a brief review of Roy Spencer’s The Great Global Warming Blunder.
Spencer uses a simple computer model and nine years of data from the
new CERES satellite instruments to separate the signal showing a
feedback (result) caused by warming from a signal showing that a forcing
(cause of warming) such as a reduction in cloud cover from natural
sources. The IPCC considers clouds are a constant and the disappearance
of clouds is a result (feedback) of warming, not a cause of warming.
Spencer disagrees and estimates that a 1% change in cloud cover, from
natural causes, would explain at least 75% of the observed warming since
1900. He suggests the natural cause for changes in cloud cover is
changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

The Chilling Stars, A New Theory of Climate Change
by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder offers a different hypothesis for
changing cloudiness: the interplay of cosmic rays and solar forces,
particularly solar wind and magnetism. (Icon Books, Cambridge, UK, 2007,
230 pages plus 6 pages of notes and scientific references). The book
explains in layman’s language the complex relationships that may lead to
formation of low lying clouds which cause cooling; and,
correspondingly, the lack of which may cause warming.

Over 50
years ago, scientists (including Fred Singer) established that the
changing solar wind and magnetism affects the quantity of high energy
cosmic rays entering into the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is
active, the solar wind is stronger and fewer high energy cosmic rays
enter the earth’s atmosphere. By 1996, Svensmark and Eigil
Friis-Christensen hypothesized that high energy cosmic rays hitting
atoms in the upper atmosphere produce ions which act as catalysts in the
formation of low level clouds. Their work was rejected by journals
until Friis-Christensen announced it at conference in Birmingham England
which was picked up by Britain’s Royal Society. This resulted in a
journal publication that was promptly ignored or criticized except in
Demark, the home of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen.

In 2005, a
Danish team conducted an experiment, called SKY, in the basement of the
Danish National Space Center. The experiment supported the hypothesis
that high energy ions emitted by cosmic ray collisions may act as
catalysts in the formation of clouds.

The
nuclear collisions of high energy cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere
also create carbon 14. Caves in Oman and elsewhere show a stunning
correlation between carbon 14 and temperature as measured by an isotope
of oxygen, indicating a causal relationship.

This book
lucidly describes the difficulty scientists who explore possible natural
causes of climate change experience in obtaining funding in a world
which gives billions to those claiming carbon dioxide causes global
warming.

Starting in late 2009, CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research, is conducting experiments testing the hypothesis
(CLOUD experiment). Svensmark mentioned to SEPP that he expects papers
on results coming out late this year. We look forward to them.

*************************************************

SEPP
has joined the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Freedomworks in
filing a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington DC
Circuit requesting review of the EPA ruling increasing mileage standards
for automobiles. This petition is to complete the February petition to
review the EPA finding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public
health and welfare.

Automobile emissions were cited by the
Supreme Court as causing sea level rise. Of course, not mentioned was
that sea levels have been rising for 18,000 years over which period they
have risen some 400 feet. It would be amusing to have the court demand
that EPA separate amount of sea level rise due to automobile emissions
from the natural rise.

"Reality
bites" is the simple answer but Newsweak has a more rambling
explanation below. Anything other than global-warming boosterism from
Newsweak is however something of a departure. They are getting cautious

Just
three years ago the politics of global warming was enjoying its golden
moment. The release in 2006 of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An
Inconvenient Truth, had riveted global audiences with its predictions of
New York and Miami under 20 feet of water. Within 12 months, leading
politicians with real power were on board.

Germany’s Angela
Merkel, dubbed the “climate chancellor” by her country’s press, arranged
a Greenland photo op with a melting iceberg and promised to cut
Europe’s emissions by 20 percent by 2020. British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, who called climate change a scourge equal to fascism, offered 60
percent by 2050. In December 2007, the world got its very first green
leader. Harnessing the issue of climate change, Kevin Rudd became prime
minister of Australia, ready to take on what he called “the biggest
political, economic, and moral challenge of our times.” Now, almost
everywhere, green politics has fallen from its lofty heights.

Following
two of the harshest winters on record in the Northern Hemisphere—not to
mention an epic economic crisis—voters no longer consider global
warming a priority. Just 42 percent of Germans now worry about climate
change, down from 62 percent in 2006. In Australia, only 53 percent
still consider it a pressing issue, down from 75 percent in 2007.
Americans rank climate change dead last of 21 problems that concern them
most, according to a January Pew poll. Last month Canada’s Prime
Minister Stephen Harper, blasting climate change as a “sideshow” to
global economic issues, canceled the meeting of environment ministers
that has preceded the G8 or G20 summit every year but one since 1994.
Merkel has slashed green-development aid in the latest round of budget
cuts, while in Washington, Barack Obama seems to have cooled on his plan
to cap emissions.

In perhaps the most striking momentum
reversal for environmental politicians, last month Rudd became the first
leader to be destroyed by his green policies. Flip-flopping over
planned emissions cuts as the opposition exploited Australian voters’
flagging support for climate measures, he was finally ousted by party
rebels.

What has turned the fight against global warming from
vote getter to political hot potato in so many places at once? Each
country has its own brute politics at play. Rudd was just as much a
victim of infighting between factions in Australia’s Labor Party as of
shifting public attitudes on global warming. Coming off a battle to push
through landmark health-care-reform legislation through Congress, Obama
has likely exhausted his political capital for another controversial
and far-reaching bill. In Europe, bailouts first of banks and now entire
countries have sucked up decision-making bandwidth and given an opening
to those who argue that climate legislation is an unaffordable economic
burden.

Cynics (and some frustrated environmentalists) say this
is all just the usual cycle in media and politics, with the public
tiring of the issue and moving on. Yet above all, it is climate politics
itself that has turned murky and double-edged. No longer does it lend
itself to the easy categories of good and bad that Rudd so successfully
exploited in 2007. And controlling the global climate turned out to be a
lot more complicated than the advocates of fierce and fast CO2 cuts
would have us believe.

Back in 2007, it was easy and popular—and
cost nothing—to announce ever-tougher but faraway targets. The snag was
that once in place, those lofty goals would require countries to get on
with the harsh and costly business of reengineering entire economies,
without which the numbers could never be reached.

Rudd was the
first green leader to fall because he was the first one to be hit by the
tough reality of having to translate goals into practice, says Oliver
Geden, a climate-policy expert at SWP, a think tank in Berlin. Not only
is Australia the world’s biggest exporter of CO2-spewing coal, but its
citizens and businesses also gobble up energy at one of the world’s
highest per capita rates. The changes required of Australians would be
immense.

Increasingly, the whole concept of radical, top-down
global targets is coming under scrutiny as citizens and governments face
tougher choices over costs and benefits. Green policies can be popular
when they mean subsidizing renewable fuels or going after unpopular
power companies, but can quickly hit a wall when they force lifestyle
change, such as less driving and fewer swimming pools—fears Rudd’s
opponents have exploited.

Policies that push trendy green fuels
also cost much more than other options, such as replacing dirty coal
with cleaner gas or emissions-free nuclear power. Some schemes, such as
America’s corn ethanol and Europe’s biodiesel made from rapeseed, have
virtually zero net emissions savings, but any petroleum they displace is
quickly bought up by China. Even in the ideal case that the United
Nations’ goal of 80 percent emissions reduction by 2050 is
technologically and politically feasible, economists disagree widely on
whether the cost of the current set of policies, such as carbon caps and
green-fuel subsidies, is justified by the avoided damage from warmer
temperatures.

What’s more, hitting emissions targets remains an
elusive quest. The world’s most ambitiously green region, Europe, has
already clocked an 11.3 percent decrease in emissions since 1990—except
much of it has little to do with climate policy. Instead, a large part
of the decrease is attributable to economic forces such as the collapse
of communist-era industry in Eastern Europe (much of which has shifted
to China), British utilities’ switch from coal to North Sea gas, as well
as the recent recession. “It’s hard to believe that we can regulate the
global temperature in 2050 when politicians cannot even get a handle on
health expenditures next year,” says Geden.

There are other ways
green policies have lost their innocence since 2007. In many ways,
green projects have become just another flavor of grubby interest
politics. Biofuels have become a new label for old-style agricultural
subsidies that funnel some $20 billion annually to landowners with
little effect on emissions (only Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol produces
any significant savings; America’s corn ethanol and Europe’s biodiesel
do not).

Germany’s solar subsidies, a signature project in the
country’s battle against climate change, are perhaps the most wasteful
green scheme on earth, producing a mere 0.25 percent of the country’s
energy at a cost to consumers of as much as $125 billion. A leading
member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the German Parliament says
there is growing unease both in his party and in the Bundestag “about
the scary monster we’ve created that is sucking up ever larger amounts
of money for a negligible effect.”

On top of all this unease came
last November’s “climategate” affair over irregularities in the report
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations
body whose findings are the basis of all climate policy. Though a review
panel has since cleared the researchers of most allegations, the
lingering controversy could further undermine the IPCC’s longstanding
push for massive CO2 reduction targets as the only viable option to deal
with global warming.

With green politics losing its moral high
ground, there is a growing realization that climate change is just one
policy priority among many that compete for limited resources and
attention. That means, first, that climate politics will likely fall off
its pedestal of being the Western world’s overarching priority.

Second,
the new sobriety could give more space to a third stream of climate
politics between those who see warming as an unmitigated catastrophe
that must be stopped at any cost, and those who reject global warming as
a hoax. A new climate realism would more carefully weigh the costs and
benefits of emissions controls, and look at other options beyond the
current set of targets. The new debate will be more pragmatic and
include a broader mix of policies. That might include a shift of
subsidies into research and development, as many climate economists have
argued.

It would also include greater efforts to adapt society
to a warmer climate, rather than focusing only on stopping the warming
process in its tracks.

That idea has so far figured little in the
debate, largely because mainstream environmentalists fear it will
distract from their push for CO2 cutbacks. Yet adaptation may offer
equally valid and much less expensive choices than cutting back on
emissions. For example, one of the most-feared effects of warming is
rising sea levels—yet mankind has successfully dealt with similar rises
for centuries. “As soon as you start talking to Dutch engineers, you
realize that sea-level rise is business as usual,” says Geden.

Declining
water supplies in some regions of the world, another effect of warmer
temperatures, might be more effectively met with efficient water
distribution and less water-hungry crops than global temperature
targets. Another emerging area of innovation is climate engineering,
such as the manipulation of cloud cover and other artificial means of
reflecting heat back into space.

In other words, some of the
money spent on current policies that often have only limited efficacy
might be better spent on other measures, including protection against
the worst effects of warming. What’s more, current economic worries are a
reminder that every dollar spent on solar cells or biodiesel is a
dollar less for education and other budget priorities. If that means
climate and environmental policies in the future will be more
stringently measured in terms of the tradeoffs involved given finite
resources, that would be a lasting benefit that even Kevin Rudd might
appreciate.

Most
people understand what an independent public inquiry is -- Except
climate scientists and politicians. In a public inquiry, a third party
with no interest in the outcome — typically a judge — is appointed by
government with a mandate to investigate an issue of public concern.

The
inquiry has its own legal counsel, investigators and budget. It has
the power to compel witnesses to testify publicly, to cross-examine
them, to demand documents and call in outside experts.

By that
standard, the three official “inquiries” into “Climategate” — the last
of which recently “exonerated” scientists at the Climatic Research Unit
(CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) — again were farces. Two
were cases of the UEA appointing sympathetic academics to investigate
itself.

The third was a one-day hearing before a British
parliamentary committee in a country that has been at the forefront of
global warming hysteria.

Climategate involved the unsanctioned
release of thousands of e-mails and documents by leading climate
scientists. The most infamous came from former CRU director Phil Jones
about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures, plus
discussing with colleagues ways to hide data from freedom of information
requests under U.K. law.

The latest “inquiry” found what the two
previous ones did — the science of climate change is sound (surprise!),
but researchers were unprofessionally secretive.

While warmists
declared “victory” with each predictable report, and are still fighting
skeptics over the credibility of various claims in the 2007 report of
the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which basically
described global warming as an existential threat, much of the public
has stopped listening.

International polls show concern over
climate change dropping — even in countries such as Germany, which has
heavily invested in renewable energy — and most significantly in the
U.S., the world’s No. 2 greenhouse gas emitter.

With China, the
world’s largest emitter, refusing to accept hard emission targets,
global negotiations to draft a successor agreement to the (widely
ignored) Kyoto accord, which expires in 2012, are stalled.

There’ll
be another attempt in Cancun this November after talks all but fell
apart in Copenhagen last December, but the effort is losing steam.

One
reason is the realization global, centrally-imposed diktats to cut
emissions over mandated time frames — mindful of the former Soviet
Union’s absurd five-year plans for the production of tin — don’t work.

Another
is politicians now have to move from promising to lower emissions,
which is easy, to lowering them, which, as the public is discovering, is
ruinously expensive, doesn’t work and will lead to power shortages.

Optimists
might say, as Newsweek did Monday in an essay, “A Green Retreat: Why
the environment is no longer a surefire political winner,” that climate
change is finally being put into perspective as one of many challenges
we face, not necessarily the most significant.

Unfortunately, the
global political fight never has been about the environment, but about
expanding government power domestically and creating, internationally, a
socialist, money-sucking scheme to transfer wealth from the first world
to the third. That effort is proceeding.

It’s how Stephen Harper
accurately described Kyoto, before he became prime minister and stopped
talking about the issue honestly. As for the opposition parties,
they’re so uninformed about the devastating economic consequences of
what they’re advocating, it’s just scary.

There
are so many variables ignored, underreported or simply not understood
in climate science and especially in the computer models that purport to
simulate global climate, that they destroy any pretence we know or
understand weather and climate. But don’t take my word for it. Consider
the comments from proponents of anthropogenic global warming including
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the 2001
report they said, “In climate research and modeling, we should
recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system,
and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate state is not
possible.” James Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis speculator said, “It’s almost
naive, scientifically speaking, to think that we can give relatively
accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that
it’s wrong to do it.” Kevin Trenberth, IPCC author and CRU associate
said, “It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system… This
may be a shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately
what’s going on with the climate, but we don’t.”

Many reports exist on the inadequacy of temperature data. Ross McKitrick asks whether a global temperature exists at all.Anthony Watts shows the serious problems with the weather stations in the US and these are supposedly the best in the world.

We also know how the record is ‘adjusted’ to support the warming theory.

However,
measurement of other variables is worse simply because of the
complexity of measurements. Instruments to accurately measure
precipitation, especially snowfall, have always been a great challenge.
Perhaps the most forgotten variable, yet critical to weather and
climate, is wind speed.

Ancient Greeks knew the importance of
wind direction and how it determined the pattern of weather in a region.
They even built a Tower of the Winds in Athens honoring the eight wind
deities (Figure 1). Direction was critical for sailing as well, so
mariners developed the ability to read the wind to 32 points of the
compass. Speed was a different matter. Early attempts had a flat board
on a spring with a pointer attached that was set against a scale. Wind
pushed the board and the pointer indicated the force. The big change
came with the wind cup or anemometer in 1846. While this provides an
accurate measure, recording the information is important because the
work the wind does requires detailed almost continuous data.

The
atmosphere is heated by air in contact with the ground (conduction) but
also by evaporation of moisture that is then released into the
atmosphere. In both cases the rate varies with wind speed. Even a small
variation in wind speed results in a variation in heat exchange and
distribution in the atmosphere.

Wind is created by difference in
pressure that is created by difference in temperature. High temperature
creates low pressure and wind then blows from the high pressure to
redress the imbalance. There are general global wind patterns created by
differential heating. If the Earth wasn’t rotating a simple circulation
of air rising at the Equator and descending at the Poles would occur,
however rotation results in generally easterly winds at the Equator and
the Poles with prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes. Each
region has different land/ water ratios so a shift in these zonal winds
will affect the role of the wind in heating the atmosphere.

Figure
2 shows plots of the percentage frequency of south winds at York
Factory located on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay for two decades
over 100 years apart. In the early decade from 1721 to 1731, which is
well within the Little Ice Age (LIA), south winds blow less than 7
percent of the time. In the decade from 1841 to 1851, which is outside
of the LIA, south winds are occur over 12 percent of the time with a
peak in 1842 of 27 percent.

The 2007 IPCC report acknowledges the
shifts in some wind patterns and associated weather systems. Based on a
variety of measurements at the surface and in the upper troposphere, it
is likely that there has been an increase and a poleward shift in NH
(Northern Hemisphere) winter storm-track activity over the second half
of the 20th century, but there are still significant uncertainties in
the magnitude of the increase due to time-dependent biases in the
reanalyses. The word “likely” is defined as greater than 66% chance. The
shift is not surprising because the prevailing westerly wind and
accompanying storm track would move north as the Earth warms.

They
acknowledge the “significant uncertainties” in the validity of
increased frequency. They don’t even attempt to discuss the significance
for heat transfer or any other impact on global weather. We know wind
causes shifts of Arctic ice to create open water or increase pack ice,
but how does this affect heat exchange or evaporation? It is even worse
in the Southern Hemisphere (SH). Analysed decreases in cyclone numbers
over the southern extratropics and increases in mean cyclone radius and
depth over much of the SH over the last two decades are subject to even
larger uncertainties.

The degree to which the IPCC and their supporters have fooled the world is amazing. As Jean-Francois Revel said: “How is it possible for a theory, which is false in its component parts, to be true as a whole.” In the case of ‘official’ climate science he could add that many parts of the whole are simply omitted.

He
explained the mentality that has pervaded the AGW supporters when he
wrote, “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly
responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather
than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the
repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than
to competence” His book titled, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of deceit in the Age of Information tells it all.

Recent
studies have linked climatic and social instabilities in ancient China;
the underlying causal mechanisms have, however, often not been
quantitatively assessed. Here, using historical records and
palaeoclimatic reconstructions during AD 10–1900, we demonstrate that
war frequency, price of rice, locust plague, drought frequency, flood
frequency and temperature in China show two predominant periodic bands
around 160 and 320 years where they interact significantly with each
other. Temperature cooling shows direct positive association with the
frequency of external aggression war to the Chinese dynasties mostly
from the northern pastoral nomadic societies, and indirect positive
association with the frequency of internal war within the Chinese
dynasties through drought and locust plagues. The collapses of the
agricultural dynasties of the Han, Tang, Song and Ming are more closely
associated with low temperature. Our study suggests that food production
during the last two millennia has been more unstable during cooler
periods, resulting in more social conflicts owing to rebellions within
the dynasties or/and southward aggressions from northern pastoral
nomadic societies in ancient China.

Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to round up enough votes to pass a
counterpart to the House's Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that would
impose an 83 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Proponents
of the restrictions, which would require the average U.S. citizen to
emit no more carbon dioxide than the average citizen emitted during the
1800s, publicly claim these draconian cuts will have little impact on
our American lifestyle, other than inducing energy producers to utilize
different fuel sources. The July 11 Washington Post, however, offered a
peek at the bait-and-switch tactics the global warming alarmists seek to
employ.

Stan Cox writes in the Post, “Washington didn't grind to
a sweaty halt last week under triple-digit temperatures. People didn't
even slow down. Instead, the three-day, 100-plus-degree,
record-shattering heat wave prompted Washingtonians to crank up their
favorite humidity-reducing, electricity-bill-busting,
fluorocarbon-filled appliance: the air conditioner. This isn’t smart. …
In a country that's among the world's highest greenhouse-gas emitters,
air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers.”

Think it
gets hot in the summer? Try making it through the summer without air
conditioning. Sure, the Washington Post article claims, people used to
make it through summers without air conditioning in years past. People
also used to make it through life without electricity, indoor plumbing,
and anesthetic – but that doesn’t mean we should welcome a return to
those times, either.

The Post article claims, “A.C.'s obvious
public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its
lavish use in everyday life for months on end.” This is the ultimate
example of the proposed dictatorship of the nanny-staters. ‘Just because
I think I can make it through the summer without air conditioning, I
don’t think anybody else should be able to use it, either.’

Give
the article points for honesty, though. There is no way intermittent
solar and wind power, which requires huge amounts of land development to
produce only a small amount of unreliable electricity, can power our
modern society. Cutting carbon dioxide emissions 83 percent, or anything
even remotely approaching 83 percent, will require Americans doing much
more than merely paying the exorbitant price increases required by
solar and wind power. It will require a fundamental and foreboding
restructuring of our entire way of life.

President
Obama has been pushing a proposal that would spend over a million
dollars for each permanent “green job” created in a solar-power
boondoggle. Billions were placed at the disposal of avowed communist
Van Jones to create these sparkling emeralds of environmentally
sensitive employment, even though no one in the Administration can
explain what they are.

If Americans wanted “green” jobs and
industries, they would pay for them. There’s some interest in such
things, of course. You’ll probably see a Prius or two on your drive
home today. It’s great when people choose to make such purchases of
their own free will, based on valid information.

Of course,
that’s not how the “Green Economy” works. Consumer decisions are driven
by false information, batted into their faces with rotting hockey
sticks by con artists and fanatics. Most of the decisions aren’t made
by consumers at all. The government created the Green Economy through
propaganda, regulations, and subsidies. Many on the Left, including the
President, have openly stated their desire to push gas prices higher,
so Americans will behave according to the designs of the
environmentalist movement.

Does this mean Americans are
completely uninterested in eco-friendly technology or alternative fuels?
Not at all. Most of us would dearly love to have cold-fusion cars, or
cheap solar electricity. However, we are not willing to compromise our
standard of living to have them right now, when they’re not adequate
substitutes for fossil fuels. The more extreme manifestations of
environmentalist fanaticism, beginning with the devastating
cap-and-trade bill, will begin pushing us back into a pre-industrial
economy.

We don’t want the higher prices and reduced standard of
living that would accompany this transformation, especially when we know
we’ve got untapped oil resources like the Alaska National Wildlife
Reserve, declared off-limits by religious edict from the Church of Gaia
in defiance of logic. Our national consensus is to wait until these
alternative energy technologies reach maturity, and deliver acceptable
performance at reasonable prices. Competition will then transition us
smoothly to alternative energy.

A correspondent who works with solar technology puts it this way:

Solar
power is something I firmly believe in. It’s not a daydream but it is a
dream. Solar power has been around for over 100 years but as an
industry it is still in its infancy. We can’t replace conventional power
generation and probably won’t be able to for another century if even
then.

The problem with Obama’s approach is that it’s some sort of
bastardization of supply side economics. He is directly subsidizing
manufacturers. So what we end up with is a huge solar array out in the
desert and lalala it won’t really do much, (but will make some Spanish
corporation a tidy sum.) This is still America (so far anyway) and to be
successful first you find or create demand for a product.

This
is all very reasonable, and perfectly in tune with the desires of most
Americans… but government is coercive force, so what we want doesn’t
matter. Massive resources are seized from the free market, and forced
into a Green Economy full of pretend jobs, and projects that have more
in common with black holes than yellow suns.

The animating
principle of radical environmentalism is that freedom is dangerous, and
cannot be allowed, because the survival of the planet is at stake. This
is what makes it such a perfect fit as the State religion of a
socialist elite. Its sacrament is antimatter to libertarian capitalism:
righteous tyranny. One of the scientist-priests of this religion,
James Lovelock, went so far as to suggest “it may be necessary to put
democracy on hold for a while” because “the inertia of humans is so huge
that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

As you can see
from those million-dollar “green” jobs, the pursuit of righteous tyranny
is hideously expensive. That’s because it shifts control of our
society to a lesser intelligence.

What do I mean by this?
Consider the purchasing and investment decisions of our three hundred
million citizens as a widely dispersed intelligence of tremendous
complexity. Resources are allocated through a vast number of individual
decisions, made with impressive speed. Each citizen becomes one
element of a mighty network. It is capable of intuition, as
sophisticated communications allow consumers to react to trends and
opportunities in a cascade of email, website postings, phone calls, and
casual conversation.

It is creative, because it’s not
restrained by ideology or central directives. People adopt new
technologies with astounding speed. With apologies to Alvin Toffler,
the only “future shock” nowadays is felt by manufacturers, as the best
high-tech products go from the expensive indulgences of trendy nerds to
household items in a matter of months.

Obama-style command
economics are a far more primitive form of intelligence. They are
directed by small groups of people wearing ideological blinders.
Politically unacceptable alternatives are ruled nonexistent. Command
economies move with glacial speed, receiving corrective input only once
every couple of years at the ballot box. They are wasteful, as vast
resources are allocated to pay off valuable constituencies, or absorbed
by a useless political class through graft.

When the government
uses taxes, regulations, and subsidies to force the free market where it
doesn’t want to go, wealth and value disappear into the gulf between
the choices made by citizens, and the State compulsion that destroys
them. This is the Void of Desire, filled with the dust of shriveled
possibilities. It grows larger and more expensive as coercion meets the
law of diminishing returns, using increasingly ridiculous spending –
and harsh penalties – to impose its mandates on a resentful, or fearful,
populace.

You can see thousands of jobs, and billions in market
value, vanishing into the void between our desires and Barack Obama’s
failed ideology. Soon the cost will become so unbearable that he and
his accomplices will be swept out of office, and we can adopt a sane
energy policy that leaves us wealth enough to create those alternative
technologies of the future… which will inevitably grow from expensive
boondoggles into priceless treasures, given enough time.

Or else
we will find out if America is willing to submit to James Lovelock’s
philosophy. The Void of Desire will either be sealed… or it will become
all-consuming.

Plans
to use money from the sale of government assets to provide the riskiest
of equity investment in green energy projects such as offshore wind and
carbon capture have been shelved by the government.

The move
comes amid signs of tension between Vince Cable at the business
department and George Osborne at the Treasury over the scale of the
coalition government’s planned green investment bank and its precise
role.

In Labour’s last Budget, Alistair Darling, then chancellor,
announced cash from the sale of the Channel tunnel rail link and other
disposals of government assets planned over the next 18 months would
provide early-stage equity investment in green energy projects.

Some
£1bn ($1.5bn) of sales proceeds were to be used as “the riskiest of
risk capital” to help attract a matching £1bn from the private sector by
removing some of the biggest risks from green energy projects. The aim
was to kick-start the further tens of billions of pounds of investment
needed from the private sector.

But, according to Andy Rose, head
of the Treasury’s infrastructure finance unit, that is now “the policy
of a previous government”.

He told an infrastructure conference
run by City and Financial: “We are not pursuing it” and it is “not on
the agenda of the current government”.

Other Treasury officials
indicated the idea might be revived when the government settles on plans
for a green investment bank later in the year, although it seemed more
likely the proceeds from asset sales – which the government still plans
to follow through – would be used to pay down debt.

The
joint call by the UK climate change secretary, the German federal
environment minister and French environment minister to raise the
European Union’s carbon emissions reduction target to 30 per cent
(Comment, July 15) leaves me highly perplexed and very worried.

According
to them, an increase in the 2020 target for reductions from 20 per cent
to 30 per cent is needed in order to create a more attractive European
environment for low-carbon investment, and to ensure that Europe can
continue to stay in “the race to compete in the low-carbon world” with
countries such as China, Japan, India and the US.

Really? Then
why are these countries not falling over one another to set themselves
new carbon emission reduction targets, as the ministers are proposing
for Europe? Have the ministers forgotten that these countries either
were not prepared to make ambitious quantified commitments at
Copenhagen, or have failed to get these through their legislative
systems? It does not seem to me that any of these countries are
following, or likely to follow in the foreseeable future, the European
path of putting additional cost burdens on industry in the hope of
achieving a low-carbon breakthrough.

European industrial
producers – in our sector and most others – have successfully reduced
energy usage in a significant way by normal economic pressures. The
result of additional cost burdens from an increased emissions reduction
target (even with partial allocation of free allowances) will simply be
less European production and more production in countries with much
higher carbon emissions per unit of production.

This does not sound a good outcome in the fight against climate change. Time for a re-think, I suggest.

For environmentalists, the BP oil spill may be disproving the maxim that great tragedies produce great change.

Traditionally,
American environmentalism wins its biggest victories after some
important piece of American environment is poisoned, exterminated or set
on fire. An oil spill and aburning river in 1969 led to new
anti-pollution laws in the 1970s. The Exxon Valdez disaster helped
create an Earth Day revival in 1990 and sparked a landmark clean-air
law.

But this year, the worst oil spill in U.S. history -- and,
before that, the worst coal-mining disaster in 40 years -- haven't put
the same kind of drive into the debate over climate change and
fossil-fuel energy.

Environmentalists
say they're trying to turn public outrage over oil-smeared pelicans
into action against more abstract things, such as oil dependence and
climate change. But historians say they're facing a political moment
deadened by a bad economy, suspicious politics and lingering doubts
after a scandal over climate scientists' e-mails.

The difference
between now and the awakenings (sic) that followed past disasters is as
stark as "on versus off," said Anthony Leiserowitz, a researcher at Yale
University who tracks public opinion on climate change.

"People's
outrage is focused on BP," Leiserowitz said. The spill "hasn't been
automatically connected to some sense that there's something more
fundamental wrong with our relationship with the natural world," he
said.

The
scientific accuracy of the United Nations' climate change reports are
coming under fire again. In a scandal that dates back to January and was
dubbed Amazongate at the time, it has been confirmed that claims of the
Amazon burning up due to climate change were sexed-up and pulled from
activist literature....

Professor Ross McKintrick says no one should be surprised that such mistakes end up in these massive reports.

“The
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) doesn’t have the
internal rigour that one would expect of it,” said McKintrick from his
office at the University of Guelph. “Nothing is in the process to
prevent activist rhetoric from appearing.” McKintrick, who teaches
environmental economics and has had his own battles with the accuracy of
climate change reports, says the calculations used in the UN reports
are often not checked for accuracy and even the much-vaunted peer-review
process does not guarantee that the information used is correct.

Amazongate is not the only claim that relies on information from activist groups.

Toronto
author Donna Lafamboise recently led a team of citizen auditors through
the 2007 climate change report and found heavy use of reports from
Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. That report is published at
noconsensus.org.

Laframboise says Greenpeace was cited at least
eight times and the WWF at least nine times, despite both groups having
clearly stated activist goals when it comes to climate change.

“This
is shocking in a report that the public has been told relies solely on
peer-reviewed research published in scientific journals,” said
Laframboise.

The UN has appointed a team of academic experts to
give advice on how to avoid these mistakes in the future, but McKintrick
says the UN isn’t really serious about changing anything.

He
points out that the authors for the next massive climate change report
have already been chosen and many were part of the last error-riddled
effort.

At
least this time the media reported some skeptical views as well -- if
only at the end of the article. Anybody who would believe the
systematically corrupted terrestrial datasets promulgated by CRU, NOAA
or NASA-GISS would believe anything

The world is hotter than
ever. March, April, May and June set records, making 2010 the warmest
year worldwide since record-keeping began in 1880, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration says.

"It's part of an overall
trend," says Jay Lawrimore, climate analysis chief at NOAA's National
Climatic Data Center. "Global temperatures ... have been rising for the
last 100-plus years. Much of the increase is due to increases in
greenhouse gases."

There were exceptions: June was cooler than
average across Scandinavia, southeastern China, and the northwestern
USA, according to NOAA's report.

If nothing changes, Lawrimore predicts:

•Flooding
rains like those in Nashville in May will be more common. "The
atmosphere is able to hold more water as it warms, and greater water
content leads to greater downpours," he says.

• Heavy snow, like
the record snows that crippled Baltimore and Washington last winter, is
likely to increase because storms are moving north. Also, the Great
Lakes aren't freezing as early or as much. "As cold outbreaks occur,
cold air goes over the Great Lakes, picks up moisture and dumps on the
Northeast," he says.

• Droughts are likely to be more severe and heat waves more frequent.

•
More arctic ice will disappear, speeding up warming, as the Arctic
Ocean warms "more than would happen if the sea ice were in place," he
says. Arctic sea ice was at a record low in June.

Marc Morano, a
global-warming skeptic who edits the Climate Depot website, says the
government "is playing the climate fear card by hyping predictions and
cherry-picking data."

Joe D'Aleo, a meteorologist who co-founded
The Weather Channel, disagrees, too. He says oceans are entering a
cooling cycle that will lower temperatures.

He says too many of
the weather stations NOAA uses are in warmer urban areas. "The only
reliable data set right now is satellite," D'Aleo says. He says NASA
satellite data shows the average temperature in June was 0.43 degrees
higher than normal. NOAA says it was 1.22 degrees higher.

And
even the inevitable attempt to show that CO2 is the villain falls down:
"But the numbers don't quite add up". How sad! Time to say that we
don't know enough about influences on the earth's atmosphere to make
climate predictions? In a rational world it would be

NASA-funded
researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet's atmosphere. High
above Earth's surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied
layer of gas called "the thermosphere" recently collapsed and now is
rebounding again.

"This is the biggest contraction of the
thermosphere in at least 43 years," says John Emmert of the Naval
Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June
19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). "It's a Space Age
record."

The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of
2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The
thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In
this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times
greater than low solar activity could explain.

"Something is going on that we do not understand," says Emmert.

The
thermosphere ranges in altitude from 90 km to 600+ km. It is a realm of
meteors, auroras and satellites, which skim through the thermosphere as
they circle Earth. It is also where solar radiation makes first contact
with our planet. The thermosphere intercepts extreme ultraviolet (EUV)
photons from the sun before they can reach the ground. When solar
activity is high, solar EUV warms the thermosphere, causing it to puff
up like a marshmallow held over a camp fire. (This heating can raise
temperatures as high as 1400 K—hence the name thermosphere.) When solar
activity is low, the opposite happens.

Lately, solar activity has
been very low. In 2008 and 2009, the sun plunged into a century-class
solar minimum. Sunspots were scarce, solar flares almost non-existent,
and solar EUV radiation was at a low ebb. Researchers immediately turned
their attention to the thermosphere to see what would happen.....

One
possible explanation is carbon dioxide (CO2). When carbon dioxide gets
into the thermosphere, it acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared
radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in
Earth's atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified
the cooling action of solar minimum.

"But the numbers don't quite
add up," says Emmert. "Even when we take CO2 into account using our
best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully
explain the thermosphere's collapse."

By
way of preamble, let me remind you where I stand on climate change. I
think climate science points to a risk that the world needs to take
seriously. I think energy policy should be intelligently directed
towards mitigating this risk. I am for a carbon tax.

I also
believe that the Climategate emails revealed, to an extent that
surprised even me (and I am difficult to surprise), an ethos of
suffocating groupthink and intellectual corruption. The scandal
attracted enormous attention in the US, and support for a new energy
policy has fallen. In sum, the scientists concerned brought their own
discipline into disrepute, and set back the prospects for a better
energy policy.

I had hoped, not very confidently, that the
various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a
first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But
no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed
apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully
wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have
chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of
understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own
cause.

The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann -- the
paleoclimatologist who came up with "the hockey stick" -- would be
difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand
at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for "lack of credible
evidence", it will not even investigate them. (At this, MIT's Richard
Lindzen tells the committee, "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these
issues are explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going
on?" The report continues: "The Investigatory Committee did not respond
to Dr Lindzen's statement. Instead, [his] attention was directed to the
fourth allegation.")

Moving on, the report then says, in effect,
that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research
funding, a man admired by his peers -- so any allegation of academic
impropriety must be false.

You think I exaggerate?

This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding
to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected
scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had
he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for
proposing research...

Had Dr. Mann's conduct of his research
been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been
impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which
typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not
agree with his scientific conclusions...

Clearly, Dr. Mann's
reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be
outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his
activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in
his field.

In short, the case for the prosecution is
never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are
true, and says no. His record is swooned over. Verdict: case dismissed,
with apologies that Mann has been put to such trouble.

Further
"vindication" of the Climategate emailers was to follow, of course, in
Muir Russell's equally probing investigation. To be fair, Russell
manages to issue a criticism or two. He says the scientists were
sometimes "misleading" -- but without meaning to be (a plea which, in
the case of the "trick to hide the decline", is an insult to one's
intelligence). On the apparent conspiracy to subvert peer review, it
found that the "allegations cannot be upheld" -- but, as the
impressively even-handed Fred Pearce of the Guardian notes, this was
partly on the grounds that "the roles of CRU scientists and others could
not be distinguished from those of colleagues. There was 'team
responsibility'." Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the university which
houses CRU, calls this "exoneration".

I am glad to see The
Economist, which I criticized for making light of the initial scandal,
taking a balanced view of these unsatisfactory proceedings. My only
quarrels with its report are quibbles. For instance, in the second
paragraph it says: " The reports conclude that the science of
climate is sound..."

Actually, they don't, as the article's last paragraph makes clear:

An earlier report on climategate from the House of Commons assumed
that a subsequent probe by a panel under Lord Oxburgh, a former academic
and chairman of Shell, would deal with the science. The Oxburgh report,
though, sought to show only that the science was not fraudulent or
systematically flawed, not that it was actually reliable. And nor did
Sir Muir, with this third report, think judging the science was his job.

Like
Pearce, The Economist rightly draws attention to the failure of the
Russell inquiry to ask Phil Jones of the CRU whether he actually deleted
any emails to defeat FoI requests. It calls this omission "rather
remarkable". Pearce calls it "extraordinary".

Myself, I would
prefer to call it "astonishing and indefensible". I don't see how,
having spotted this, the magazine can conclude that the report, overall,
was "thorough, but it will not satisfy all the critics." (Well, the
critics make such unreasonable demands! Look into the charges, they say.
Hear from the other side. Ask the obvious questions. It never stops:
you just can't satisfy these people.)

However, The Economist is calling for the IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri to go. That's good.

So
where does this leave us? Walter Russell Mead is always worth reading
on this subject, and I usually agree with him -- but I think his summing
up in this case is not quite right.

Greens who
feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations
following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would
reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were
watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be
charitable) isn't so much that climate change is happening and that it
is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The
Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or
responsible counsel about what to do.

He's right, of
course, that the green movement is not trusted as an adviser on what to
do. So what? Its counsel on policy is not required. Nor, for that
matter, is a complex international treaty of the sort that Copenhagen
failed to produce. Congress and the administration can get to the right
policy -- an explicit or implicit carbon tax; subsidies for low-carbon
energy -- without the greens' input, so long as public opinion is
convinced that the problem is real and needs to be addressed.

It's
not the extreme or otherwise ill-advised policy recommendations of the
greens that have turned opinion against action of any kind, though I
grant you they're no help. It's the diminished credibility of the claim
that we have a problem in the first place. That is why Climategate
mattered. And that is why these absurd "vindications" of the climate
scientists involved also matter.

The economic burdens of
mitigating climate change will not be shouldered until a sufficient
number of voters believe the problem is real, serious, and pressing.
Restoring confidence in climate science has to come first. That, in
turn, means trusting voters with all of the doubts and unanswered
questions -- with inconvenient data as well as data that confirm the
story -- instead of misleading them (unintentionally, of course) into
believing that everything is cut and dried. The inquiries could have
started that process. They have further delayed it.

Carbon
rationing is dead on Capitol Hill. The Democratic leadership in the
Senate has concluded that they cannot round up enough votes to pass a
cap-and-trade carbon rationing bill that aims to cut the emissions of
greenhouse gases. But in the face of the catastrophic Gulf oil spill,
congressional leaders feel that they must be seen as doing something
about energy. And if that something provides members of Congress an
opportunity to hand out federal pork to their friends, that’s a bonus.

So
Democrats and some Republicans are pushing legislation that will reward
favored industries, chiefly wind and solar power, by forcing consumers
to buy the electricity that they produce. How? By requiring that retail
electricity distributors purchase 15 to 20 percent of their electricity
from wind and solar power producers by 2020. This so-called national
renewable energy standard, or clean energy standard, is being carved out
of energy legislation such as the American Clean Energy Leadership Act
[PDF] proposed by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM).

Supporters argue
that renewable energy standards cut greenhouse gas emissions, create
jobs, revitalize rural communities, boost energy independence, and even
lower energy prices. Many politicians find them irresistible as a way to
signal to voters that they are serious about energy policy. As a
consequence, two-thirds of Americans already live in the 28 states that
since 1995 have begun to pursue various schemes to force consumers to
buy wind and solar power. But are the claims of supporters economically
credible?

When it comes to cheaply cutting greenhouse gases,
renewable energy standards actually mandate perverse incentives,
according to a 2008 analysis [PDF] by California State University,
Fullerton, economist Robert Michaels. When it comes to cutting
greenhouse gases, it may be cheaper to figure out how to get customers
to cut back their demand for energy rather than build new expensive
renewable capacity. Simply mandating extra capacity forecloses the
opportunity to find which way is more efficient. For example, when a
utility incentivizes customers to permanently cut their demand for a
megawatt of capacity, this has the same effect on emissions as investing
in a megawatt of renewable energy capacity. But under most current
state schemes, cutting load by a megawatt under a 20 percent renewable
energy standard reduces a utility’s obligation by only 0.2 megawatts,
while building an additional megawatt of renewable capacity counts fully
for compliance.

Put another way, increasing the price of
electricity causes renewable energy standards to function like a really
inefficient energy tax. A salient analogy comes from the conservative
think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Consider the case of a farmer who
can produce 10,000 bushels of wheat using irrigation. Now suppose that
the government prohibits irrigation which cuts his production to 9,000
bushels. From the point of view of the farmer that is the same as a 10
percent tax. But had the government imposed an actual 10 percent tax, it
would have at least had 1,000 bushels of wheat to redistribute.
Instead, those bushels (megawatt hours) just disappear.

The claim
that renewable energy mandates boost overall job creation is persistent
and powerful, but the experience of other countries clearly shows that
such mandates destroy more jobs than they create. A study last October
by an independent German economics think tank found that each solar
power job cost $240,000 and overall the result of renewable energy
subsidies was higher energy prices, lost jobs in other sectors of the
economy, and reduced consumer purchasing power. The German study
mirrored the findings of an earlier Spanish university study which
reported that every green job created by subsidizing renewable energy
destroyed 2.2 jobs in other sectors of the economy.

Vast
agricultural subsidies have failed to “revitalize” rural areas, so why
should one expect that renewable energy mandates causing wind farms to
sprout across the vacant countryside will do the trick? As Michaels
notes, supporters of renewable energy standards “do not make clear why
outmigration that has persisted for a century should be reversed, or why
power consumers should bear the costs.” Why should coastal urbanites
pay more for electricity just to keep 'em down on the farm in North
Dakota and Kansas?

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a
scoundrel,” quipped the 18th century wit, Samuel Johnson. Two centuries
later, few things in political life are more scoundrelly than calls for
energy independence. When it comes to electricity, we are already
largely energy independent since the vast majority of our power [PDF] is
now generated using domestic coal, natural gas, and hydropower.

Mandating
renewable energy standards will not make us more energy independent
with respect to electricity, just poorer. But just how much poorer is
hotly disputed. Environmental activist groups such as the Union of
Concerned Scientists say renewable energy standards will boost
electricity costs by mere pennies per day. As evidence, backers of
renewable energy standards cite studies such as the recent one from the
Energy Information Administration (EIA) that finds that the standards
would boost electricity prices by a measly 3 percent by 2020. Hardly
noticeable.

But can that be? Michaels notes that EIA and most
other studies on renewable energy standards rely on the National Energy
Modeling System to make their cost projections. This is the same energy
modeling system that the EIA used in 2000 to project that the price of
oil in 2010 would be $29 per barrel [PDF] (adjusted for 2009 dollars).
It was about $75 per barrel yesterday. Perhaps more interestingly, the
EIA also projected in 2000 that renewables would make up a “smaller
share of U.S. electricity generation, declining from 11.3 percent in
1998 to 9.5 percent in 2020.” The upshot is that energy model
projections may be useful for outlining scenarios for energy planners,
but they are not predictions.

Setting aside quibbles about energy
cost and capacity modeling, if renewables like wind power were already
cost competitive, then Congress would not need to mandate them. So will
renewables soon be cost competitive? There are reasons to doubt they
will be. Taking EIA projections with the requisite grain of salt, the
agency’s Annual Energy Outlook for 2010 estimated the levelized costs
[PDF] of various generation plants in 2016. Levelized costs include the
cost of constructing a plant, the time required to construct a plant,
the non-fuel costs of operating a plant, the fuel costs, the cost of
financing, and the utilization of a plant. The levelized costs per
megawatt hour are $100 for conventional coal power, rising to $129 for
advanced coal with carbon capture and sequestration. On-shore wind costs
are $149 per megawatt hour, and off-shore costs are $191. The cost of
solar photovoltaic power is $396 per megawatt hour and solar thermal is
$257. For what it’s worth, advanced nuclear comes in at $119 per
megawatt hour.

Crudely, these levelized costs suggest that
substituting wind for conventional coal under a 20 percent mandate would
boost electricity prices by 10 percent. Similarly substituting solar
photovoltaic power would increase electricity prices by about 20
percent. A recent analysis by the Heritage Foundation takes into account
the costs of building a vast new national high voltage electricity grid
to transmit wind and solar power from the plains and the deserts to
coastal cities, the costs of building and maintaining additional natural
gas electricity generation capacity to back up intermittent renewable
energy sources, and consumer cuts in their electricity use due to higher
prices. Once these and other factors are added in, the Heritage
Foundation study finds that in 2020 a 15 percent renewable energy
standard would reduce the disposal incomes of American families by
$1,700 per year and increase unemployment over what it would otherwise
have been by more than one million jobs.

Ultimately, the top-down
imposition of a renewable energy standard now being considered by
Congress is a stupid and costly way to cut greenhouse gas emissions;
will destroy more jobs than it creates; is just another wasteful subsidy
showered on depopulating rural communities; will do nothing for the
chimerical pursuit of energy independence; and will, in fact, increase
energy prices to consumers. A national renewable energy standard,
concludes California State University economist Michaels, “is an
inefficient and inequitable response to the emissions of pollutants and
greenhouse gases, a reassuring and ultimately dysfunctional distraction
from real problems.” What could be more perfect for bipartisan action in
Congress?

Many of
the so-called solutions the green movement proposes consist of turning
back the clock and relying on technology we left behind decades, even
centuries ago: They want us to use windmills and railroads, use more
land for crops (and thereby less for forests), and burn plants to make
energy. Now, there has come along a fellow who thinks air conditioning
is a bane rather than a boon and hankers for the offices of the 1940s.

In
a world without air conditioning, a warmer, more flexible, more relaxed
workplace helps make summer a time to slow down again. Three-digit
temperatures prompt siestas. Code-orange days mean offices are closed.
Shorter summer business hours and month-long closings — common in
pre-air-conditioned America — return.

Business suits are out, for
both sexes. And with the right to open a window, office employees no
longer have to carry sweaters or space heaters to work in the summer.
After a long absence, ceiling fans, window fans and desk fans (and, for
that matter, paperweights) take back the American office.

But
why stop there? In British India they used to have natives called
punkah wallahs, who would pull on ropes that swung a large ceiling fan.
Adopting the punkah would massively increase employment!

However, he might have a case when he makes this argument:

Best
of all, Washington's biggest business — government — is transformed. In
1978, 50 years after air conditioning was installed in Congress, New
York Times columnist Russell Baker noted that, pre-A.C., Congress was
forced to adjourn to avoid Washington's torturous summers, and "the
nation enjoyed a respite from the promulgation of more laws, the
depredations of lobbyists, the hatching of new schemes for Federal
expansion and, of course, the cost of maintaining a government running
at full blast."

Post-A.C., Congress again adjourns for the
summer, giving "tea partiers" the smaller government they seek. During
unseasonably warm spring and fall days, hearings are held under canopies
on the Capitol lawn. What better way to foster open government and
prompt politicians to focus on climate change?

I suggest
Congress and government agencies lead by example and adopt this rule of
no air conditioning immediately. In fact, I'm sure it must be somewhere
in Speaker Pelosi's Greening the Capitol initiative. Questions should
be asked on the floor as to why they're running the AC this week.

Green/Left Australian government likely to turn down people's electricity consumption by 3 percent a year

That's
about 10% during their term of government if they win the upcoming
election. At the very least, power is going to cost Australians a lot
more. The crazy talk is already pushing prices up

In what
is likely to be a vigorous debate, this afternoon cabinet will also
consider a proposal to cut energy consumption by up to 3 per cent a
year.

The target is strongly supported by some ministers
searching for ways to rebuild Labor's green credentials - battered by
the deferral of the emissions trading scheme - before the election
expected to be called for late next month.

But others argue that
such a target could cause politically dangerous rises in electricity
prices and another scare campaign by the Coalition.

Ms Gillard is
under pressure from some ministers to promise that Labor will legislate
an emissions trading scheme in a second term, to placate voters angry
that Labor deferred the program.

Sources say Ms Gillard is intent
on building industry and community consensus for a workable scheme
before a final decision, in part to ensure the new policy does not
founder in the Senate as the original scheme did.

Asked yesterday
if she sought to differentiate herself from the Opposition Leader, Tony
Abbott, on the starting point issue of accepting climate science, Ms
Gillard said: "I believe climate change is caused by human activity.

"I
also understand that doing the things that we will need to do to change
our economy, to change the way we live to deal with climate change, are
complicated. They will require dialogue with the community. They will
require the community's deep and lasting consensus about these changes."

Sources said other energy-efficiency measures proposed in a recent expert report are more likely to win cabinet support.

These
include setting nationwide efficiency standards and possibly a scheme
to allow farmers to claim credit for saving emissions through forestry
and land management in ways that comply with the international rules
under the Kyoto protocol.

Policies to meet the new national
energy initiative would include requirements that electricity retailers
reduce energy usage by their customers by a fixed percentage each year.

Cabinet
will also consider pollution standards for new electricity generators
and requirements for existing generators to calculate how they can
reduce their greenhouse emissions.

Energy industry and other
businesses are seeking definition from the government, complaining that
not knowing whether or when they will face a carbon price is creating an
untenable level of investment uncertainty.

The energy industry
says that within a few years the uncertainty will lead to short-term
investment decisions that will push up the cost of power anyway - the
same hip-pocket concern that has driven political opposition to an
emissions trading scheme.

The
United Kingdom’s Freedom ofInformation Act (FoIA) and the Environmental
Information Regulations (EIRs) are intended to provide a mechanism
whereby information held by public authorities can be accessed by the
public. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recently
considered the disclosure of information from the Climatic Research Unit
(CRU) at the University of East Anglia and concluded that emails
revealed scientists encouraged colleagues to resist disclosure and
delete emails, apparently to prevent disclosure through FoI requests.

The
case study presented here focuses on requests under FoI legislation to
obtain climate information from the Met Office, particularly relating to
assessments of global warming and causal relationships with greenhouse
gas emissions.

Evidence suggests both the CRU and the Met Office
are part of a culture where institutional climate scientists are
antagonistic towards disclosure of information. This has serious
implications for both the effective operation of FoI legislation and the
openness and transparency of climate change assessments.

[Australia's]
ABC are fond of using photos of melting ice packs to accompany reports
of alarming man made global warming, perhaps to emphasise how
"unprecedented" this appears to be.

However a recent article
titled "Reduced ice extent on the western Antarctic Peninsula at 700-970
cal. yr B.P." published in the prestigious journal "Geology" reports
that melting ice in the Antarctic, particularly in the West Antarctica
peninsula, is not unprecedented at all, but is quite a common natural
occurrence happening regardless of human influence.

The abstract reads:

"Rapid
warming and consequent ice-shelf collapse have focused attention on the
glacial record of the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, we present the first
record of terrestrial organic material exposed by recently retreating
ice that bears on past glacier extent and climate in this sensitive
region. Radiocarbon dates show that ice on Anvers Island was at or
behind its present position at 700–970 cal. yr B.P., coincident with ice
reduction elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Moreover, the data
indicate that present reduced ice extent on the western Antarctic
Peninsula is not unprecedented and is similar to that experienced during
at least three periods in the last 5600 yr."

Perhaps the ABC
will firstly report on this important new study, and secondly, perhaps
it will now find more appropriate imagery to accompany articles on
Dangerous Man Made Global Warming.

With
opinion polls showing the U.S. public strongly opposes the imposition
of expensive cap-and-trade restrictions on greenhouse gases in the
middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is attempting to pull off a deceitful
bait-and-switch scam that would make the most ruthless used-car dealer
blush.

A Cap by Any Other Name . . .

The primary effect of
Reid’s plan—forcing an expensive and substantial reduction in U.S.
carbon dioxide emissions—remains the same as before, though the language
of his plan has been scrubbed of all references to global warming or
cap-and-trade.

But an expensive cap on carbon dioxide emissions, by any other name, is still an expensive cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

Until
now, global warming activists have been upfront about their desire to
force a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, seeking to pass a
law requiring an 83 percent cut. U.S. consumers would have no choice
but to purchase much more expensive renewable energy.

But polls
show the American public is already angry about persistent unemployment,
a looming federal debt crisis, and an expensive and unwanted Obamacare
health insurance mandate. The public realizes cap-and-trade would add to
the nation’s economic burdens, and polls show voters will harshly
punish politicians who try to impose such a mandate.

The answer
to this political dilemma, Reid figures, is simple: Scrub any references
to global warming or cap-and-trade from his desired legislation, while
still forcing people to switch to expensive renewable energy sources.

Back-Door Carbon Cap

Reid’s
new plan is to pass a drastic renewable power mandate that would
directly force American consumers to purchase the same amount of
expensive renewable power that a cap-and-trade bill would require in a
less direct manner.

Instead of legislation saying, “You must
reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 83 percent,” with the only possible
means being purchasing expensive renewable power instead of inexpensive
conventional power, Reid is pushing for legislation saying, “You must
purchase most of your power from renewable sources,” which accomplishes
the same thing just as surely, and just as expensively, as cap-and-trade
would.

Preplanned Divisiveness

Reid also is considering
an alternative strategy that would retain explicit cap-and-trade
language but initially impose restrictions on the utility industry
alone. Those behind that scheme believe it will be easier to divide and
conquer individual sectors of the U.S. economy than to hit them all at
once.

The plan is to sell cap-and-trade restrictions on the
utility industry alone as a “compromise” global warming bill—and then go
after the rest of the economy once their foot is in the door and the
utilities are under the government’s thumb.

Proponents of this
divide-and-conquer strategy argue utilities will then throw their weight
behind efforts to cap other sectors of the economy, to level the
playing field—albeit at a much higher altitude.

Such a
“compromise” bill addressing the utility sector alone would be an
attempt to pit various sectors of the economy against each other and
ultimately clear the path for universal CO2 restrictions.

Thwarting Voters’ Will

Either
approach means the same thing: Reid is baiting the American public by
saying he is not proposing a cap-and-trade bill, but he is planning the
most deceitful of switches by imposing mandates and restrictions that
accomplish the exact same thing at the exact same cost.

Just as
troubling, with wavering Democrats concerned that supporting either plan
could spell doom for them in the November elections, Reid is
considering waiting until after the November elections to present his
schemes to a lame-duck Congress that will not have to fear voter
backlash for at least another two years and could include many members
who have already been voted out of office.

All that Harry Reid is
missing in his dishonest used car salesman playbook is a rolled-back
odometer and bubble gum holding the car doors in place. One thing’s
clear: The U.S. economy will be a wreck if any of these schemes becomes
reality.

The
Big Green Lie is falling apart. And it’s not about Climategate and
Glaciergate. It’s not about the science. It’s not even about public
confidence in the integrity of the green movement — although this
confidence is unlikely to regain the levels of 2009. Humpty Dumpty has
fallen from the walls, and all the establishment commissions and
investigations in Europe cannot glue him together again....

The
greens, it is increasingly clear, bet the ranch on the Copenhagen
process. That horrible meltdown, perhaps the biggest and most chaotic
public embarrassment in the history of multilateral summits, turned
climate change from global poster boy to global pariah. The green
activists who advised their bosses to go to that summit and make large
public commitments about global warming are in the doghouse now.
Success is sometimes the most cruel and definitive form of failure: the
Copenhagen Summit was exactly that kind of success for the climate
change movement. They got all the world leaders together, got every
television camera on the planet to focus in — and let everybody see just
how confused and utopian their plans really were.

As the greens
struggle to figure out how a cause so righteous, so necessary has gone
so far off course, the Kool-Aide drinkers among them have frenetically
concocted and endlessly repeated a narrative that casts all blame on the
vileness and the stupidity of their opponents. Those awful climate
deniers and their nefarious Big Oil paymasters are the vicious super
villains who stopped this glorious social movement dead in its tracks.
Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and other evil quacks manufactured the
appearance of scandal — the East Anglia emails, the ‘glaciergate’ charge
and so forth. Aided by a clueless media, and pushed by evil carbon
emitters, these non-stories took on a macabre life of their own.

But
now, natter the cluelessly chirpy greens, all that is over. Limbaugh’s
Big Lie has been conclusively disproved! The independent panels have
reviewed the evidence in a dispassionate and thorough way, and both
climate science and climate scientists have been cleared.

So presumably we will all be going back to Copenhagen soon, this time ready to sign up for that treaty?

Well,
no. For one thing, the ‘vindication’ is less sweeping and thorough
than the green cheerleaders acknowledge. As climate skeptic Pat
Michaels argues in the Wall Street Journal, some of the investigators
had significant links to the targets of the investigation and many of
the most important questions were not addressed. A suspicious and
skeptical public will not be convinced without a significantly more
transparent process; the story isn’t over yet. Not until commissions
that include prominent climate skeptics and genuinely independent
figures ask all the relevant questions will this story die down.

Worse,
even the very partial and incomplete results now emerging are in some
ways a damaging indictment of the impartiality and trustworthiness of
some climate scientists and environmental leaders. The greens were
found innocent of inventing the science, but guilty of systematically
hyping their case. The serious media are distancing themselves from the
green leadership at this point more than nuzzling back into their arms.
The New York Times report on the Dutch and British reports
investigating the East Anglia CRU and the IPCC was widely hailed by
infatuated green outlets as evidence that the whole scandal was a fraud;
the actual Times story is considerably more cautious (and the text is
more cautious than the headline). Andrew Revkin, whose coverage on his
Times Dot Earth blog has often been considerably sharper and more
far-sighted than what appears in the Grey Lady’s printed pages and has
made him no friends among the environmentalist hard core, is making some
very solid points.

The influential Economist, which has long
been one of the most respected establishment voices urging fast action
on climate change, is now voicing important qualifications and doubts
about the green case. Perhaps even more than the Times, the Economist
takes a sober view of recent events, noting that there is a pattern of
exaggeration and hype in the IPCC documents reflecting some serious
management and culture problems — and suggesting that Rajendra Pachauri
is not the man to set things right. More, the Economist is putting out
some extraordinary journalism on the complexity of the climate change
problem and the difficulties that result when one tries to leap from
science to policy. What the Economist is reporting is that excitable
greens have oversold a wide variety of worst case scenarios — and
underestimated the complex nature of the relationship between climate
change and world politics.

In sum, the mainstream press seems to
be swinging around toward the views expressed on this blog: that the
scandals may not discredit or even really affect the underlying
scientific arguments about climate change but they do cast doubt on the
perspicacity of the movement’s leadership — and that a fundamental
rethink is called for.

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who
hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and
Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious
flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing.
The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that
climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at
least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green
movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to
do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that
they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The
attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may
work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic;
this vision and these people come up short when set against the
challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the
earth’s climate system. Many leaders of today’s environmental movement
are like the anti-alcohol activists before Prohibition who convinced
Americans that the problem of alcohol abuse was real, destructive, and
likely to get worse unless addressed. These farsighted activists were
absolutely correct: with the introduction of the motorcar alcohol was
more destructive than ever; with more than 500,000 alcohol related
highway deaths between 1982 and 2008, more Americans have been killed on
our roads as a result of drunk driving since 1915 than have died in our
wars.

The problem is that the remedy proposed, Prohibition, not
only failed to solve the problem — it made the problem of alcohol abuse
worse, and it also reduced respect for the law and led to the rise of
organized crime in the United States on an unprecedented scale.

The
Prohibitionists were brilliantly, scientifically correct about the
problem: they were foolishly and destructively blind about how to deal
with it.

The green movement’s strategic failure is also
reminiscent of the Peace Movement of the 1920s. Chuckleheaded
do-gooders correctly recognized the problem of war. In the conditions
of the twentieth century, great power wars like World War One were
radically unacceptable. Unless war could be stopped, scores of millions
might brutally die. Whole nations would be devastated; millions of
children would starve. Given the rise of aircraft, great cultural
monuments would be destroyed as the world’s greatest cities were razed
to the ground. New and more terrible weapons would be developed under
wartime conditions, weapons that potentially could lead to the
destruction of all human civilization or even of life on earth.

Again,
the Peace Movement of the 1920s was completely right about this — we
know to our sorrow today just how right they were. Yet the strategies
they proposed — a treaty to ‘outlaw war’ in the 1920s, and appeasement
of dictators and revisionist powers in the 193os — were utter disasters
and made World War Two inevitable. The Nuclear Freeze movement in the
1980s repeated the mistake: confusing the identification of a problem
(nuclear weapons) with a workable policy solution (a unilateral western
freeze on nuclear weapons deployment that would have given the Soviets
superiority in Europe). There are fewer nuclear weapons today than
would have existed had the Nuclear Freeze people had their way; there
almost certainly would have been fewer wars and fewer war deaths if the
policy recommendations of the pre-World War Two peace movements had been
greeted with the obloquy and contempt they deserved.

You can
diagnose a disease but have no clue how to treat it. You can be an
excellent climate scientist and a wretched social engineer. You can want
to do good and end up furthering exactly the evils you most deplore.

That is where most of the organized green groups stand today.

The
real and lasting damage that the green movement sustained in the last
eight months has been the revelation that it is strategically and
politically incompetent. It adopted a foolish grand strategy (a global
treaty by unanimous consent) and attempted to stampede the world to
agreement by hyping the science and whooping the treaty through. That
was never going to work; the green movement today is living with the
bitter consequences of its strategic blindness....

At best, the
green movement might be compared to an alarm clock: jangling shrilly to
wake up the world. That is fair enough; they have turned our attention
to a problem that needs to be carefully examined and dealt with. But
the first thing you do when you wake up is to turn the alarm clock off;
otherwise that shrill beeping noise will distract you from the problems
of the day.

The alarm clock will never understand this; making
shrill and irrational noise is what alarm clocks do and is all they
understand. But sensible and thoughtful people who want humanity to
live fuller, richer lives in a cleaner and more sustainable world need
to get past the naive and crude policy ideas that currently dominate
green thinking and start giving these questions the serious attention
and careful thought they deserve.

A
lawsuit hopes to stop the construction of an off-shore wind farm in
Massachusetts. A couple of plaintiffs on the suit are environmental
organizations.

Ironic? Not really. One of the plaintiffs,
CAlifornians for Renewable Energy (CARE), is against industrial wind
farms altogether. Michael Boyd, president of the Board of Directors for
CARE, says the amount of wilderness damage done by wind farms far
outweighs the benefits.

But that has not slowed investors or the
federal government down. As investors reap the benefits of government
subsidies for the construction of wind farms, large turbines continue to
rise all over the nation. This begs the question, as a renewable energy
source, are wind farms really as beneficial as the government says they
are?

“Whenever the government picks winner and losers by its
choosing to fund various programs, in this case wind farms, taxpayers’
money ends up wasted and more harm is done than good,” says Bill Wilson,
president for Americans for Limited Government (ALG).

Environmental
organizations look at the impact wind farms have on wildlife and
endangered or protected species. For example, the Altamont Pass wind
farm in California was ruled a complete disaster by environmentalists
because protected bird species, like eagles and hawks, were getting
killed by the propellers of the turbines.

Some turbines can reach
400 feet tall and turn at speeds of 200 mph in peak times. Walter
Kittelberger, chairman of the Board of Trustees for Lower Laguna Madre
Foundation (LLMF), a Texas-based conservation and preservation
organization that is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the wind
farm in Massachusetts, is concerned that with so many new wind farms
being constructed, bird’s migratory flight patterns are going to get
caught in the crosshairs of these turbines.

Though some instances
of birds or bats getting caught in the propellers may not be
preventable, before each wind farm is built, a developer has to get a
series of permits and leases before construction can begin. Investors
have to follow the federal regulations before starting a wind farm
project. Some projects draw more attention than others and an outside
organization will want to conduct its own research as well.

Mass
Audubon works to protect the lands in Massachusetts and conducted its
own study of the off-shore wind farm in Massachusetts, which Boyd and
Kittelberger both oppose. Mass Audubon found that the planned wind farm
off the coast “doesn’t propose any harm” to any protected species, says
Jack Clarke, director of public policy and government relations for Mass
Audubon.

Boyd and Kittelberger don’t believe it. “Many locations
of these land and off-shore wind farms are on well documented migratory
pathways for birds,” Kittelberger says.

Then why are wind farms
still being constructed? Boyd thinks that when a developer creates a
wind farm, they are after something else beside renewable energy.

“They
want to build wind farms not because they want to produce green energy,
but because they want green money,” he says. “Wind power has the lowest
capacity factor during peak demand because its highest production
occurs in the early morning, late evening and the middle of the night.
Industrial wind technology is a meretricious commodity, attractive in a
superficial way but without real value.”

Kittelberger recognizes
that by the government offering incentives to build wind farms, it is
creating a misconception about energy needs.

“Lighting up a home
uses less than 1 percent of imported oil,” he says. “Most homes use
natural gas, nuclear or hydro, with a small amount using solar or wind.
There is no shortage of electricity in America; we just lack an
efficient way to distribute it.”

Kittelberger thinks the
government’s talk of ridding America’s use of foreign oil has blurred a
line, linking transportation energy and electric energy by its offering
of subsidies for electric energy.

Since they don’t believe there
is a need to produce more electricity, both Boyd and Kittelberger don’t
believe the cost to the environment is worth the small amount of
electricity produced by wind farms.

Wind energy also takes a toll on the environment because of the vast amount of space needed to construct a wind farm.

Kittelberger
uses this example to explain how much space is needed for a wind farm.
For a 1,900 megawatt facility you would need about 500 acres if the
facility were a coal or nuclear energy plant. For a wind farm to produce
that same amount of energy, he says you would need between 50,000 and
60,000 acres because the turbines need enough space so they aren’t
stealing wind from each other.

Needing so much space, many wind
farms are built far away from city life where the electricity is needed.
Not only does this create additional costs if more transmission wires
are needed to transport the electricity, but it also reduces the amount
of electricity received by its end source. Kittelberger says that only
about one-third of the electricity conducted makes it to the end user.

Wilson,
Boyd and Kittelberger do not think wind energy is sustainable, nor do
they believe it will last past the government’s handout of subsidies.

“Wind
is intermittent. It is not what we need,” Kittelberger says. ALG’s
Wilson agrees, and adds, “Using energy independence as an excuse to fund
unsustainable green energy programs hurts America and taxpayers can no
longer afford it.”

Brussels is planning to allow each member state to decide whether to grow GM foods or to ban them.

The
European Commission today published proposals that it said were
designed to give countries more freedom and flexibility over the
cultivation of genetically modified crops.

But opponents of
'Frankenstein foods' warned that the changes would speed up the approval
regime for the controversial crops and ensure that efforts by some
states to block them will be side-stepped.

At present, EU countries vote together on whether to allow applications to grow new GM crops.

In
future, once scientists working for the commission approve a new crop
or food as safe, any of the 27 member states will be allowed to grow it
or put in on shop shelves.

Other countries, which in the past might have blocked approval, will be able to implement their own boycott.

The
commission said the new regime, which must still be approved by EU
governments and the European Parliament, 'seeks to achieve the right
balance between maintaining an EU authorisation system and the freedom
for member states to decide on GM cultivation in their territory'.

Health
and consumer policy commissioner John Dalli said: 'Experience with GM
organisms so far shows that member states need more flexibility to
organise the co- existence of GM and other types of crops such as
conventional and organic crops.

'A very thorough safety
assessment and a reinforced monitoring system are priorities in GM
cultivation and are therefore being pursued vigorously.'GM protest

But
there are concerns that Britain's Conservative-Lib Dem Government will
follow the same pro-GM agenda adopted by the last Labour government.

Despite
massive opposition from British shoppers, successive administrations
have been pressing for the acceptance of GM farming across Europe.

This
support has been maintained-despite concerns for human health and
evidence from the U.S. of the emergence of GM superweeds such as pigweed
that are choking some farms.

Caroline Spelman, the Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, has a history of supporting
genetically modified crops through her links to the farming industry.

And
the Food Standards Agency is facing accusations that it is trying to
push GM on to dinner plates through a planned £500,000 consultation
exercise.

The American agro-chemical giants behind GM farming see
the move by the EU as a vital step towards getting consumers on this
side of the Atlantic to accept their crops.

Previously, the U.S.
government has complained to the World Trade Organisation that attempts
to block GM by European governments are an illegal restraint of free
trade.

Mute Schimpf, Friends of the Earth Europe's food
campaigner, said: 'While the commission is seemingly offering countries
the right to implement national bans, in reality the proposal aims to do
the opposite - opening Europe's fields to GM crops.

'The
commission continues to fail to protect Europe's food and feed from
contamination by GM crops, and we urge countries to reject this deal as
it stands.'

GM Freeze, a coalition of community groups and green
campaigners, said: 'The proposals have been produced to try to overcome
member state opposition to the commercial cultivation approval of GM
crops.

'Many member states are not happy with the safety
assessments of GM crops for cultivation on health and environmental
grounds and have demanded a tougher approach.'

One concern is
that the plans do not offer safeguards and compensation to organic and
conventional farmers whose crops are contaminated by GM pollen.

GM
Freeze director Pete Riley added: 'Member states need to ensure that in
the short and long-term they will be able to ban a GM crop without
ending up in court or with a WTO dispute.'

I mentioned here on 10th
that examinations of CO2 as a cause of global warming indicate that
the null hypothesis should be accepted (i.e. no effect shown). The
paper I referred to at the time is available in full here

Excerpt:

The ‘radiative forcing constants’ in the IPCC models are devoid of
physical meaning. This approach is empirical pseudoscience that belongs
to the realm of climate astrology. The results derived from climate
simulations that use the radiative forcing approach may be of limited
academic interest in assessing model performance. However, such results
are computational science fiction that have no relationship to the
reality of the Earth’s climate. Radiative forcing by CO2 is, by
definition a self-fulfilling prophesy, since the outcome is pre-ordained
with a total disregard of the basic laws of physics. An increase in CO2
concentration must increase surface temperature. No other outcome is
allowed and other possible climate effects are by definition excluded.

Based on the arguments presented here, a null hypothesis for CO2 is proposed:

It is impossible to show that changes in CO2 concentration have
caused any climate change to the Earth’s climate, at least since the
current composition of the atmosphere was set by ocean photosynthesis
about one billion years ago.

Collapse of (Climate) Physics

More from Prof. Claes Johnson

The
collapse of climate science, or more precisely climate alarmism based
on the greenhouse-effect, which we are now witnessing, can be seen as a
consequence of the collapse of physics with the takeover of Modernity in
Physics, Arts and Music in the beginning of the 20th century, when
Penguin Logic came to replace the rational logic and physics of the 19th
century.

The greenhouse-effect states that by backradiation,
the Earth surface will be heated by the presence of the trace gas CO2 in
a colder atmosphere.

Now, the greenhouse-effect indicates a collapse of physics because

* it is not described in physics books

* it is not denied by physicists.

Climate
alarmism is based on the greenhouse-effect, taking for granted that it
has a solid physics basis. But it is not described in the physics
literature and so is a free invention.

The collapse is signified
by the fact that this is not what physicists are saying: They say
nothing and thereby give silent support to a climate alarmism based on a
greenhouse-effect without physics basis.

Why do physicists
keep silent? Because the greenhouse-effect is based on backradiation and
to understand that backradiation is unphysical, requires understanding
the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. But the 2nd Law is a mystery to modern
physicists and thus a modern physicist cannot say what should be said,
namely that backradiation violates the 2nd Law and thus the
greenhouse-effect is fiction. This is a veritable collapse.

Read
here. Well.....Mann didn't claim Philadelphia is "burning" but the
shady :-) climate scientist did make a comparably stupid, invalid claim:
“Record heat wave in the US that’s part of a larger picture of
early summer temperatures that are the warmest on record, which is
part of a larger picture of a globe that is running warmer than ever
before…”

As Dr. Richard Keen over at Watts Up With That
visually documents, Mann again proves he will say anything, whether
being false or just plain wrong, to push his warming agenda. Using the
actual Philadelphia temperatures, the recent heat wave is not out of the
ordinary.

Possibly,
the Mann-bear-pig scientist might want to apply his "warming-science"
to the Los Angeles or San Diego record summer cold - oh yeah, that's
right, California cold is only weather, not global cooling.

Certainly,
it's never too late to learn to appreciate actual empirical evidence,
and thus, we recommend that Mr. Mann peruse our modern temperature
charts for a while. If he were to do so, he may discover that the actual
temperature data does not strongly support the AGW crisis hysteria. In
fact modern temperature increases look pretty natural when compared to
historical and ancient temperatures.

Renewables like solar power and others can't fuel America's future. Say experts: Just do the math

About
once a month, Robert Bryce climbs onto the roof of his Austin, Texas,
home, lugging a long-handled mop. The science writer and Manhattan
Institute fellow isn't cleaning gutters. He's cleaning solar panels.

The
3,200-watts of solar photovoltaic panels provide one-third of the
electricity that Bryce's family consumes, slightly reducing his monthly
power bill. But the panels aren't without problems: The start-up costs
were high, the inverter has already broken once, and the panels require
regular cleaning.

Bryce quickly wondered if the panels were worth
the investment, and he soon realized that the limits of solar power for
his Texas home extended to the rest of the country: Solar power won't
run America anytime soon. Neither will wind power.

Yet that's
precisely the direction many suggest taking: Congress was poised in late
June to begin debating an energy bill that could require utility
companies to generate more electricity from wind, solar, or other
renewable energy sources. When President Barack Obama seized the Gulf
Coast oil spill to push for a clean energy bill, he spoke of wind power,
though wind has little immediate connection with oil: Wind produces
electricity, not the kind of fuel that oil provides for cars. "You can
build windmills from coast to coast, and it doesn't do anything to help
our oil situation," says Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI).

But the president's push for government-funded
wind and solar energy—and away from sources like coal and oil—isn't new.
Obama's February budget proposal for 2011 included a 48 percent
increase in government subsidies for wind power—from $83 million this
year to $123 million in 2011. On solar energy, the president asked for a
22 percent hike—from $247 million to $302 million.

For Bryce,
the problems with wind and solar power are simple: The math doesn't add
up. The author of Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real
Fuels of the Future (PublicAffairs, 2010), Bryce says wind and solar
simply can't provide large amounts of power at a reasonable cost, a
critical need for rich and poor countries alike.

Instead, Bryce
and others point to already-proven energy sources they believe deserve
more attention: natural gas and nuclear energy.

Natural gas,
particularly, is abundant and available now. It's also easier to extract
than oil and cleaner than coal. And—like nuclear power—natural gas
trumps any wide-scale potential promised by wind or solar energy.

"I'm
all for renewables," Bryce says. "I wish they worked better than they
do. But our energy and power systems are not determined by carbon
content or political correctness. They're determined by math and
physics."

Math and physics offer stark realities about wind and solar energy. The most obvious problem: The sources are intermittent.

As
Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Energy
and Water Development, told Environment and Energy Daily: "The wind
doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine."

To make
the energy sources consistently reliable on a wide scale would require
massive amounts of reliable storage—technology that doesn't exist on a
cost-effective basis. Forcing utility companies to generate more of
their power using wind and solar would likely raise energy costs for
U.S. consumers.

Another problem: Wind and solar require massive
amounts of land to produce and transport energy. The Nature Conservancy,
a U.S. environmental group, published a report last year estimating
that wind power requires about 30 times as much land as nuclear energy,
and four times as much land required for natural gas.

The high
costs, unreliability, and land usage aren't just a problem for
prosperous nations like the United States. The dynamic is especially
unrealistic for developing countries in desperate need of cheap energy
for basic survival. Connecting the developing world to affordable
sources of energy—including sources like coal and oil—and moving the
poorest populations away from using sources like wood and dung, remains a
critical way to raise the standard of living in some of the most
miserable places in the world.

Cal Beisner of the evangelical
Cornwall Alliance points out that energy policy in the United States
isn't isolated: "The average American does not connect the person in
Sudan cooking over dung with energy policy in the U.S."

But
policies that would raise the cost of energy here also serve as a model
to other nations and as a basis for international treaties on energy
consumption, says Beisner: "Not only would those policies hurt Americans
by raising the price of energy for all of us . . . they would also
impose such policies on people who desperately need to be delivered from
the dirtiest possible fuels."

How critical is cheap energy for
developing countries? Bryce points out that Africa—a continent with 14
percent of the world's population—has developed only 3 percent of the
world's electricity. Of the 15 countries in the world with the highest
death rates, 14 of them are in Africa. Of the 22 countries with the
highest infant mortality rates, 21 of them are in Africa. Many factors
contribute to those high death rates, but a widespread availability of
cheap energy would likely make life healthier for millions.

Back
in the United States, if wind and solar remain unrealistic for
large-scale, cost-effective energy, natural gas has already proven
itself on both counts: Natural gas provided nearly a quarter of the
nation's energy for electricity in 2009, second only to coal.

Advances
in technology over the last five years have created a mini-revolution
in extracting natural gas using new methods, opening up new gas supplies
all over the country. Hayward of AEI says fields are so vast, it's
conceivable that the United States could become an exporter of natural
gas over the next few decades. The new technology could also hold
promise for developing countries still creating their power systems, if
they embrace natural gas as a major source of energy that is far cleaner
than coal.

Peter Huber, author of The Bottomless Well (Basic
Books, 2005), sees another major use for natural gas: transportation.
The United States consumes massive amounts of oil for vehicles each
year, but Huber thinks natural gas could compete. He notes that some 10
million vehicles worldwide already run on natural gas. Vehicles would
require more natural gas to travel the same distance, but Huber says
modifications to vehicles over the coming years could accommodate the
change. And since natural gas is cheaper than oil, the option could
still be cost effective.

Major challenges remain: Natural gas
pipelines—regulated by the federal government—would need to run to the
gas stations that supply fuel, and the fuel still wouldn't work for
every vehicle. And many critics cite safety concerns against using
natural gas in vehicles.

Critics also worry that more drilling
for natural gas could lead to groundwater contamination for nearby
neighborhoods—a concern natural gas companies will need to acknowledge
and monitor.

Natural gas advocates emphasize that gas isn't an
energy silver bullet, and that any major energy transition will still
take decades. But they insist the technology holds more long-term
promise than wind or solar. In the meantime, they say we shouldn't
abandon one of the best fuels we have: oil. Despite the devastating BP
oil spill, oil advocates point out that major spills are rare, and that
relying more heavily on imports could lead to tanker spills—already much
more common than well leaks.

With any major energy transition
still years away, Hayward says oil is here to stay for at least decades.
"The 'problem with oil' is that it's such a terrific fuel, it's hard to
match its performance and cost with anything else." Bryce agrees, and
bristles when politicians complain about an abundance of fossil fuels.

"Without
those fossil fuels, we would be returned to the incredible
environmental destruction and nasty living conditions and incredibly
hard labor of the 19th century," he says. "We would be living in dire
poverty."

The
ocean is Earth's largest single sink for CO2 outside of the planet's
crust itself. Simple sea creatures depend on carbon dissolved in the
ocean's water for their existence, and their actions create a biological
carbon “pump” that removes vast quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Large amounts are suspended in the water column as dissolved organic
carbon (DOC), and each year the ocean's biological pump deposits some
300 million tons of carbon in the deep ocean sink. New findings have
revealed that massive amounts of carbon are converted into “inedible”
forms of organic carbon that remain out of circulation for thousands of
years, effectively sequestering the carbon by removing it from the ocean
food chain. According to Jiao Nianzhi, a microbial ecologist here at
Xiamen University, the amount stored is tremendous: “It's really huge.
It's comparable to all the carbon dioxide in the air.”

On
average, the world's oceans absorb 2% more carbon than they emit each
year, forming an important sink in the overall carbon cycle. CO2 is
absorbed by the ocean in a number of ways. Some dissolves into the water
column, forming carbonic acid (H2CO3) while more enters the seas
through the food chain. Green, photosynthesizing plankton converts as
much as 60 gigatons of carbon per year into organic carbon—roughly the
same amount fixed by land plants and almost 10 times the amount emitted
by human activity. But this form of carbon is only stored for a short
period of time.

According to a news focus article in Science by
Richard Stone: “Even more massive amounts of carbon are suspended in the
water column as DOC. The oceans hold an estimated 700 billion tons of
carbon as DOC—more than all land biomass put together (600 billion tons
of carbon) and nearly as much as all the CO2 in the air (750 billion
tons of carbon).” The carbon cycle with its various sinks and sources
are shown in the IPCC diagram below.

What is more important is
the conversion of immense amounts of bioavailable organic carbon into
difficult-to-digest forms known as refractory DOC. The microbe driven
conversion has been named the microbial carbon pump (MCP) by Jiao. Once
transformed into a form less palatable to hungry marine microorganisms,
the sequestered carbon can build up in the ocean's waters forming a huge
reservoir of stored carbon. The process is described in a Nature
Reviews Microbiology perspective, “Microbial production of recalcitrant
dissolved organic matter: long-term carbon storage in the global ocean,”
written by Jaio and colleagues. Their findings are described in the
article's abstract:

The biological pump is a process whereby
CO2 in the upper ocean is fixed by primary producers and transported to
the deep ocean as sinking biogenic particles or as dissolved organic
matter. The fate of most of this exported material is remineralization
to CO2, which accumulates in deep waters until it is eventually
ventilated again at the sea surface. However, a proportion of the fixed
carbon is not mineralized but is instead stored for millennia as
recalcitrant dissolved organic matter. The processes and mechanisms
involved in the generation of this large carbon reservoir are poorly
understood. Here, we propose the microbial carbon pump as a conceptual
framework to address this important, multifaceted biogeochemical
problem.

Many oceanographers credit Jiao with first recognizing
the dominant role microbes play in “pumping” bioavailable carbon into a
pool of relatively inert compounds “The existence of this ‘inedible’
organic carbon in the ocean has been known for quite some time. But its
role in the global carbon cycle has been recognized only recently,” says
Michal Koblizek, a microbiologist at the Institute of Microbiology in
Trebon, Czech Republic. Furthermore, Markus Weinbauer, a microbial
oceanographer at Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche in France,
states that the concept “could revolutionize our view of carbon
sequestration.” ....

Here is a previously unsuspected mechanism
that can explain how nature keeps Earth's ecology in balance, despite
the presence of human CO2 emissions. The microbial carbon pump, perhaps
in concert with the “jelly pump” discovered by Lebrato and Jones in
2006, are busy compensating for the relatively small amount of carbon
human activity releases each year. It is a natural regulation mechanism
that science did not know existed and still does not fully understand,
meaning that how Earth's ecology and climate interact must be revised.
As Steven Wilhelm, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee,
notes, “We are just at the dawn of developing this understanding.”

Carbon
is essential to life on Earth, and the carbon cycle helps regulate both
life and climate. Nature has many hidden mechanisms that help manage
carbon and CO2—mechanisms that were unknown when the commotion over
anthropogenic global warming erupted decades ago and other mechanisms as
yet undiscovered. Predictions that the ocean will soon lose its
capacity to absorb CO2 were made in ignorance and have been shown to be
wrong. What new discoveries the young and incomplete field of climate
science will make in the future is anyone's guess. One thing is certain,
those who would cry doom and predict the death of the ocean at human
hands will have to invent new hazards to frighten the public. This is
“settled science” like quicksand is solid ground.

Wind Turbines: Analysis of the Epidemiology and Related Evidence on Health

Summary:

This
important document prepared by Dr. Carl V. Phillips MPP, PhD, was
submitted to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission as testimony on
whether turbine noise is having an adverse effect on human health.

Executive Summary

A
summary of the main conclusions of my expert opinion, based on my
knowledge of epidemiology and scientific methods, and my reading of the
available studies and reports, is as follows:

• There is ample
scientific evidence to conclude that wind turbines cause serious health
problems for some people living nearby. Some of the most compelling
evidence in support of this has been somewhat overlooked in previous
analyses, including that the existing evidence fits what is known as the
case-crossover study design, one of the most useful studies in
epidemiology, and the revealed preference (observed behavior) data of
people leaving their homes, etc., which provides objective measures of
what would otherwise be subjective phenomena. In general, this is an
exposure-disease combination where causation can be inferred from a
smaller number of less formal observations than is possible for cases
such as chemical exposure and cancer risk.

• The reported health
effects, including insomnia, loss of concentration, anxiety, and general
psychological distress are as real as physical ailments, and are part
of accepted modern definitions of individual and public health. While
such ailments are sometimes more difficult to study, they probably
account for more of the total burden of morbidity in Western countries
than do strictly physical diseases. It is true that there is no bright
line between these diseases and less intense similar problems that would
not usually be called a disease, this is a case for taking the less
intense versions of the problems more seriously in making policy
decisions, not to ignore the serious diseases.

• Existing
evidence is not sufficient to make several important quantifications,
including what portion of the population is susceptible to the health
effects from particular exposures, how much total health impact wind
turbines have, and the magnitude of exposure needed to cause substantial
risk of important health effects. However, these are questions that
could be answered if some resources were devoted to finding the answer.
It is not necessary to proceed with siting so that more data can
accumulate, since there is enough data now if it were gathered and
analyzed.

• The reports that claim that there is no evidence of
health effects are based on a very simplistic understanding of
epidemiology and self-serving definitions of what does not count as
evidence. Though those reports probably seem convincing prima facie,
they do not represent proper scientific reasoning, and in some cases the
conclusions of those reports do not even match their own analysis.

There is now an
increasing number of physical scientists who are ridiculing the entire
basis of the greenhouse theory. What they are saying is a bit hard to
follow for the layman so I am going to have a stab at explaining it for a
general audience. Apologies in advance if I oversimplify.

In a
real greenhouse (growing tomatoes etc.) there is a glass lid on the
greenhouse, which means that the hot air rising off the bottom of the
greenhouse cannot escape and just sticks around in its hot state. Then
further hot air rising also cannot escape and adds to the amount of
trapped heat.

But there is no glass lid circling the earth. CO2
is just a gas and cannot trap anything. So scientists have to come up
with a new type of "greenhouse" if they want to offer a theory about why
the earth should be heating up. And their theory is that heat is like a
rubber ball: As soon as it hits some CO2 it bounces back down to earth
("backradiation")

But heat is not a rubber ball or anything like
it. Heat is just motion -- motion among molecules. So if heated air
rising off the earth hits some CO2 it may transfer some of its motion to
the CO2 (and thus heat it up a bit) but that is the end of it. There
is nothing to bounce and nothing to bounce off.

This post connects to previous posts arguing that backradiation is unphysical.

Recall
that backradiation from atmospheric greenhouse CO2 is the scientific
corner-stone of IPCC climate alarmism, supported by in particular the
Royal Society and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. This
corner-stone is unphysical and purely fictional.

In Computational
Black Body Radiation I give a mathematical explanation of Planck's
black body radiation law based on finite precision computation, as an
alternative to the statistics of quanta used by Planck himself.

The
basic problem is to explain why and how nature avoids an ultra-violet
catastrophy by cutting off radiation of frequencies higher than a
certain cut-off frequency proportional to the temperature according to
Wien's displacement Law (see fig above): Higher temperature allows
higher frequencies to be radiated, as seen in the color of a fire
changing with temperature.

Planck explains the cut-off using
statistical mechanics by viewing radiating waves to be assembled from a
certain smallest unit of energy (quanta) and assuming that high
energy/frequency is rare because it requires assembly of many quanta.

In
Computational Black Body Radiation I propose an alternative explanation
viewing radiation the result of a form of analog finite precision
computation (performed by oscillating atoms/molecules) with the
precision being proportional to temperature (mean oscillation amplitude)
leading to high frequency cut-off.

The explanation of cut-off by
finite precision computation offers an explanation of the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics expressing that heat/radiation energy by itself can be
transferred from a warm to a colder body, but not from a cold body to a
warmer. Why is it so?

Because in transfer from warm to cold,
high precision/energy/frequency waves are transformed to low
precision/energy/frequency waves. In short, high precision can
transformed by itself (with low precision) to low precision.

On
the other hand, transfer from cold to warm, would require low precision
to be transformed into high precision, and that is only possible by
exterior (high precision) intervention.

Let us now give some
examples illustrating that transfer from warm to cold is
physical/observable while transfer from cold to warm is
unphysical/nonobservable, because of limitations in analog finite
precision computation:

To
help understand why the overwhelming "consensus" of climatologists
believe that IR active "greenhouse" gases are warming the planet, it is
helpful to visit one of America's top universities, the University of
Massachusetts, to check on what the climatology professors are teaching
future climatologists. U Mass has kindly provided us with this
"greenhouse effect" calculator used in their climatology course to help
answer homework questions. The calculator allows you to dial in the
essential "greenhouse effect" parameters of solar input, albedo
(reflection - primarily from clouds), and the percentage of [unphysical]
"back radiation" to calculate the temperature of any planet with a
"greenhouse effect" :

Let's
use this handy calculator to create our own test of the "greenhouse
effect," assuming an Al Gore apocalyptic scenario of the earth's
atmosphere [currently 0.0389% CO2] having a greenhouse gas concentration
so high that the atmosphere becomes a perfect "back-radiator" of heat
from the earth and doesn't let any heat at all escape to space, but
still lets the solar energy in. We use the default values for solar
input of 1367 Wm-2, albedo of 31%, and set back radiation at 100% (.999)
rather than the default 39.7%, and observe that the average temperature
of the earth rises to 1428.05°K, or 2111°F. Now 2111°F is pretty hot,
in fact aluminum melts at 1220°F, magnesium at 1200°F, and steel at
2600°F. Amazing that the "greenhouse gases" can accomplish this while
ideal laboratory conditions cannot. The maximum laboratory temperatures
that could be obtained with a laboratory blackbody which absorbs nearly
all incoming radiation is given by the Stefan-Boltzman equation, which
tells us the maximum temperature with the same inputs would be 359.11°K
or 186.72°F. Hmmm, that's less by a factor of 11 than what greenhouse
gases can supposedly achieve according to U Mass. The greenhouse
hypothesis makes a self-contradictory claim that back-radiation causes a
body to EXCEED the blackbody limit, even though a laboratory blackbody
EPITOMIZES the effect of back-radiation.

I'm pretty sure that if
you tried this at home, with ten 100 Watt light bulbs mounted on a
mirror 1 meter square to provide 1000 Wm-2 heat input (analogous to
solar input of 1367 Wm-2 minus 31% albedo = 943 Wm-2), hung this
contraption a bit above the earth and facing downwards, that the earth's
surface temperature would rise less than to 2111°F. Or just stand up
and point a 1000W hair blower down at your foot; I did and my foot is
fine. I'm also pretty sure that if you did the Siddons mirror example,
you would not find that the mirror makes the spot on the wall brighter
by a factor of 11 (actual amount is zero).

Why such an absurd
result from UMass? It's because greenhouse theory ignores the
conservation of energy demanded by the 1st law of thermodynamics by
assuming our atmosphere is one giant perpetual heat engine "back
radiating" heat energy from colder "greenhouse gases" to the earth,
causing it to warm up far beyond the solar input, and rinse, cycle,
repeat...global calamity. It also ignores the 2nd law of thermodynamics
by assuming a cold body ('greenhouse gases") can warm a hot body
(earth).

These errors in basic 18th century physics continue to
be promulgated at U Mass and indeed most everywhere else. The "beauty"
of the greenhouse theory is that it has two major fudge factors to play
with: albedo (which is poorly understood and difficult to measure) and
unphysical % "back radiation." By assigning arbitrary values to these
two fudge factors one can program a computer model that looks like it
agrees with global temperatures and thus bamboozle most scientists and
the public, while hiding a perpetual motion machine (heat pump) inside.
These science fiction theatrics do not warrant the waste of billion$ to
enrich the likes of Al Gore & George Soros to the detriment of the
rest of humanity.

For papers reflecting the actual physics of the
atmosphere, see the Gerlich & Tscheuschner papers and this
non-technical summary. See also the Chilingar et al paper.

“Climate
science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest
standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct,”
stated the Muir Russell reportinto the Climategate scandal after it
found the Climatic Research Unit at the UK’s East Anglia University
guilty of “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree
of openness.” This failure, the Russell report declared to wide
agreement among climate scientists, led to harm “to the reputation of
the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.”

To
ensure that climate scientists never again harm the cause of science in
this way, the Russell report then recommended that scientists adhere to
new standards of openness. “Without such openness, the credibility of
their work will suffer because it will always be at risk of allegations
of concealment and hence mal-practice.”

The Russell report was
released last week. This week the UN’s Intergovernmental; Panel on
Climate Change and other scientists have their first opportunity to
apply the new standards by admitting to yet another gross transgression.

The
opportunity comes via the latest revelation over Amazongate, a scandal
that erupted in January, just two months after the Climategate scandal
broke in November. The Amazongate story begins with a claim in the
IPCC’s 2007 report that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react
drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation,” leading to the
forest’s conversion to savannah. The IPCC gave as its source a report
by WWF, the environmental lobby group. The press then dubbed this
failure by the IPCC to rely upon peer-reviewed science “Amazongate.”

Last
month, one of the media outlets that exposed Amazongate, the Sunday
Times, retracted its story, apparently in the belief that the WWF had
based its claim about the looming destruction of the Amazon on
legitimate peer-reviewed science. If so, the IPCC’s error was trivial –
it had sloppily quoted WWF instead of the actual peer-reviewed science.

With
the Sunday Times retraction, most of the worldwide press and
climate-friendly blogosphere jumped to the assertion that the IPCC had
been exonerated. “Newspapers retract faulty climate reporting,” stated a
Washington Post headline. “Lies Concocted By Climate Deniers Likely To
Stick Around Despite Corrections,” stated the Huffington Post. Climate
scientists everywhere supported the belief that WWF had based its views
on peer-reviewed science.

One reporter, Christopher Booker at the
London Telegraph, wondered where, exactly, was the peer-reviewed
document that the WWF relied upon. When he was stonewalled in obtaining
answers he dug and dug and finally found WWF’s source. As he explains,
it “was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but
originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a
small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.” Booker’s impressive
sleuthing is described in detail here.

The IPCC now has the
opportunity to rise to Muir Russell’s challenge. He posed the following
problem for science in introducing his Climategate report to the press:
“How is science to be conducted in a new world of openness,
accountability and indeed what I might term citizen involvement in
public interest science? … There need to be ways of handling criticism
and challenge, of responding to a range of different sorts of criticism
and getting into a more productive relationship with critics than we
have sometimes seen in this case.”

Will the IPCC and others in
the climate science establishment pass this, their first test in the new
world of openness? I hope they do. I know they won’t.

The
third British investigation into the Climategate scandal — led by former
civil servant Sir Muir Russell — amounts, at best, to a greywash. No
reason, it claims, to doubt the honesty of the scientists related to the
Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (which
commissioned the review). However, buried within the review’s 160 pages
considerable doubt is raised about the operations of both the CRU and
the organization that it serves, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.

For anybody who wants to understand the
scientific and psychological background to Climategate, there is no
better read than Andrew Montford’s new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion:
Climategate and the Corruption of Science.

Climategate was based
largely on emails related to the so-called “Hockey Stick,” an iconic
graph that purported to show that 20th-century temperatures were
unprecedented in at least a thousand years. As Mr. Montford points out,
“[T]he chief importance of the Hockey Stick lies not in that it is
central to the case for man-made global warming, but in the fact that
the IPCC promoted it as if it were.”

In other words, the real scandal lies in whoever was pulling the political strings of the IPCC.

The
U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, an influential skeptical
institution, has now appointed Mr. Montford to run an inquiry into the
three British inquiries. There will be no whitewash here, although it
will be fascinating to see how far Mr. Montford can penetrate into the
Yes Minister nature of the investigations, whose guiding principle seems
to have been that of the Three Wise Monkeys.

The Hockey Stick
Illusion leaves no doubt about Mr. Montford’s reporting abilities. He
tells a gripping detective story in which the star gumshoe is
semi-retired Canadian mining consultant Steve McIntyre. Mr. McIntyre,
unfortunately for his opponents, happens to combine mathematical genius
with a Terminator-like relentlessness. He also found a brilliant partner
in Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph.
Their story is one of intellectual determination in the face of
Kafkaesque “peer review” and Orwellian “freedom of information.”

The
Hockey Stick derived from the arcane science of paleoclimatology, which
reconstructs pre-thermometer temperatures from proxies such as tree
rings. The most oft-quoted of the Climategate emails referred to a
“trick” to “hide the decline” in proxy data after 1960. Those post-1960
proxy figures not merely failed to correspond with actual temperature
increases, they raised inevitable issues about past reconstructions.
This was particularly important because the Hockey Stick had —
conveniently — eliminated the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings
were farming in Greenland.

If temperatures were as warm or warmer
a thousand years ago, then the claim that 20th-century heat was
unprecedented and due to rising levels of man-made CO2 was weakened.
(And even if the 20th century was unprecedented, that still wouldn’t
have “proved” man-made global warming. Correlation is not causation.)

The
Hockey Stick reconstruction was led by an ambitious and aggressive
young climatologist named Michael Mann of the University of
Massachusetts. It was eagerly seized upon by the IPCC. Its prominence
made Prof. Mann an academic star and the recipient of hefty research
grants. In 2002, Scientific American named him one of “50 leading
visionaries in science.”

However, Mr. McIntyre’s determined
digging suggested that Prof. Mann’s conclusions rested on dodgy
statistical manipulation of a tiny amount of data from a few unreliable
proxy trees in very specific locations. It also led to two U.S.
congressional inquiries, one of which Mr. Montford notes was flagrantly
rigged.

Mr. Montford’s book might be accused of being one-sided,
but Mr. McIntyre’s opponents emerge as an unresponsive clique who were
hardly likely to co-operate with a narrative that had them lying,
destroying data, and mounting vicious ad hominem attacks (such as that
Mr. McIntyre had close links to the perpetually demonized “fossil fuel
industry.” He didn’t.).

“The Hockey Team,” as Mr. McIntyre wryly
called them, were also no credit to the scientific method. CRU head Phil
Jones — whose emails were at the heart of Climategate — sent an amazing
response to an Australian researcher asking why he should provide data
“when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.” But that is
exactly why data and methods should be made freely available.

Messrs.
McIntyre and McKitrick were in fact brought into the IPCC review
process for the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, but presumably mainly to
keep an eye on — or muzzle — them. However, being involved in the
process confirmed how rigged and conflicted it was.

Mr. Montford
concludes that the Hockey Stick affair suggests that “the case for
global warming, far from being settled is actually weak and
unconvincing. The implications for policymakers are stark. They have
granted an effective monopoly on scientific advice to an organization
that has proven itself to be corrupt, biased and beset by conflicts of
interest. Their advisors on the global-warming issue are essentially a
law unto themselves ….”

Meanwhile, the hockey stick may be only
one of many other examples of botched or manipulated science. “Who knows
what other instances there are of arguments contrary to the IPCC
consensus disappearing into the ether, of doubts suppressed and
questions ignored?” asks Mr. Montford. “It is clear that it would be
foolish in the extreme to give the IPCC the benefit of the doubt. Their
record is too poor, the stakes too high.”

Mr. Montford’s book is
required reading, but it only scratches the surface of the much bigger
scandal. The Hockey Stick graph was used as a promotional tool for a
political agenda. No inquiry has even begun to address the origins and
nature of that agenda, which amounts to building a rationale for
unprecedented global economic control. Prof. Mann writes in one of the
Climategate emails about letting “our supporters in higher places” deal
with Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick. But who were these “supporters?”
Another Hockey Team member, Keith Briffa, wrote: “I know there is
pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented
warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data,’ but in reality
the situation is not quite so simple.”

Where was that “pressure” coming from?

The
wholesale acceptance of the alarmist hypothesis by virtually the entire
global political establishment and an overwhelming proportion of the
world’s popular media also demands analysis.

Prof. Mann, who is
now at Penn State, continues his campaign of bluster and demonization of
those who would merely dare to ask questions. In an interview in the
wake of the Russell report, he continued to deride the “malicious” and
“dishonest” attacks on him by alleged “professional climate change
deniers” and “contrarians” and “special interests.” (In the interview he
exploded his scientific credibility by claiming that the current North
American heat wave is proof of man-made global warming!)

Anybody
who reads Mr. Montford’s book will understand that Prof. Mann’s charges
of “well-funded” opposition are ludicrous. The only oversight of the
Hockey Team was “provided by volunteers like McIntyre and his ragtag
band of skeptic supporters.” But, as Mr. Montford points out, Prof.
Mann’s strategy has always been to try to shout “louder and longer.”

Ultimately,
Prof. Mann and his colleagues were merely foot soldiers in a bigger
ideological thrust to use the environment as a rationale for assuming
global economic control.

Mr. Montford writes of one of the early
climate meetings that “One can almost detect the germ of an idea forming
in the minds of the scientists and bureaucrats assembled in Geneva:
here, potentially, was a source of funding and influence without end.
Where might it lead?”

But it is unlikely that such thoughts were
articulated as anything other than concern for the planet, and a burning
desire to “speak up” for those who were most vulnerable to bad weather
caused by materialism and greedy “fossil fuel interests.” The lust for
power almost invariably cloaks itself in high moral purpose. What higher
purpose could there be than saving the world?

The
recent explosions in Massey’s Upper Big Branch coal mine and on the
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig highlight the tragedy of workplace
fatalities. Though improvement in statistical averages do little to
lessen the loss of those whose loved ones have died, the American
workplace has gotten safer which means fewer will be grieving. The
Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries reached a record low in 2008: 3.6
per 100,000 full-time workers. Yet with the recent noted losses in the
oil and coal industries, some might think that workplace fatalities
could be reduced even more by moving away from fossil fuels and toward
renewable energy. The facts suggest the opposite.

The largest
source of new renewable energy is wind power, which accounts for 62
percent of renewable electricity generation. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics doesn’t publish accident data specifically for the wind-power
industry, but the Caithness Windfarms Information Forum(CWIF) has
created a list of fatalities for the wind industry worldwide. The list
is compiled from news reports and is unlikely to be comprehensive.

That
there are any fatalities in this industry should not be surprising.
Towers for modern wind turbines can rise 300 feet or more and the blades
for the rotors extend another 150 feet beyond that. (For comparison,
note that the Statue of Liberty on its 150-foot granite pedestal reaches
305 feet.) A single wind farm can require erecting a thousand of these
450-foot structures. How many fatalities have there been?

Taking
the CWIF fatalities for the U.S. and removing deaths that are only
tangentially related to wind power, shows that there were 10 deaths in
the wind-power industry over the years 2003-2008. This would seem to
make wind power much safer than coal mining, which had 176 fatalities
over the same period. However, much less energy was generated by wind
than by coal.

To project changes in workplace safety from
switching to wind from coal, it is necessary to know the mortality rate
per megawatt-hour. The low number of total deaths in the wind-power
industry is undermined by the very low amount of power generated by
wind. Adjusting for power production yields a surprising result. On a
million-megawatt-hour basis, the wind-energy industry has averaged
0.0220 deaths compared with 0.0147 for coal over the years 2003-2008.
Even adding coal’s share of fatalities in the power-generation industry,
which brings the rate up to 0.0164, still leaves wind power with a 34
percent higher mortality rate. For the record, the workplace fatality
rate for wind also exceeds that for oil and gas on an equivalent-energy
basis.

Meeting the 20 percent renewable energy standard from the
Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill with wind power would require swapping
about 800 million megawatt-hours of coal generated current with 800
million megawatt-hours of wind power. Using the recent mortality rates
as a guide, we would expect there to be 4-5 more workplace fatalities
per year than if there were no wind power at all. Even this comparison
ignores the fatalities we could expect from the additional power lines
needed for so much remote wind power.

Certainly the impetus for
moving to wind power did not come from concern over workplace
fatalities. However, the story of wind and safety illustrates an
important dimension of the energy debate—there is a lot we don’t know
about the impact of forcing dramatic shifts in our energy portfolio. At
small levels of production, negative impacts might be overlooked or
even misinterpreted. For instance, the energy inputs needed, the
environmental costs, and the impact on the food supply were
significantly underestimated by many who promoted ethanol as a
substitute for gasoline. Now that ethanol consumes roughly 30 percent
of our corn crop, these impacts offer a sobering reality check on the
previous euphoria.

Further refinements on mortality rates for
wind energy may show that it is relatively better or worse than this
first cut at the estimates. But what we see when we look deeper is that
due, in part, to its unreliable nature, wind power is an imperfect and
very expensive substitute for conventionally-generated electricity; that
it takes huge amounts of land; and it’s not so good for some components
of the environment like bats. The argument for forcing consumers to
buy increasing amounts of wind power gets weaker the more we investigate
its full impacts.

The
Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that government science bodies in
Australia had become cowed and corrupted by politicians.

The
Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that following the lead
of the climate alarmists infecting the government owned ABC, CSIRO, BOM
and most state and federal science departments were now singing the
government song on climate. “It’s time to de-politicise the Australian
government climate science industry.”

Forbes explained: “The once
great CSIRO has abandoned objective climate research in favour of
global warming activism. “This started with its selective promotion of
extreme drought scenarios. With a portfolio of over twenty unproven
climate models to choose from, CSIRO chose one forecasting severe
droughts to support the alarmist Garnaut report. “Then CSIRO applied
pressure on staff who disagreed with Penny Wong’s ETS. One who wrote a
critical report was censured and resigned.

“The last straw was
the recent appointment of CSIRO’s Chairman – he is a lawyer whose day
job is a merchant banker with a huge vested interest in carbon trading.
He is a global warming alarmist whose long term climate observations are
taken on weekends from his yacht in Port Phillip Bay.

“Both
CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are now focussed, not on climate
research or weather forecasting, but on holding secret meetings to
discuss how to spread alarmist propaganda on man-made global warming and
how to combat “skeptics and denialists”.

“Even the numerous
state departments of Agriculture and Forestry are so cowed that not one
scientist is prepared to say out loud that, over the life of a cow or a
tree, there are ZERO net emissions or extractions of carbon dioxide.

“The
corrupting influence of government money and government control has
destroyed the spirit of open enquiry in Universities, CSIRO, BOM, the
EPA, the government media machine and most of the state departments of
Agriculture, Environment, Forestry, Energy, Planning and Resources.
Politics is even affecting Science Education.

“All government
science organisations should be removed from the ACT (Australian Carbon
Territory) and the corroding influence of Carbonerra City. They should
be directed by scientists and producers from the agriculture, forestry,
fishing, mining and processing industries they supposedly serve.

“Finally, all government research projects should have a specific life and goal and be put out to tender.”

Meteorologist blogger
Anthony Watts normally talks about the crumbling science of man-caused
global warming, but recently he described an uninvited office guest
demanding to know about his alleged "big oil funding." The charge that
only the lure of big money causes people to question warmist gospel is
old but, as it turns out, of highly questionable origin.

The misconception that there is a serious disagreement among
scientists about global warming is actually an illusion that has been
deliberately fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded
cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil,
coal, and utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new
policies that would interfere with their current business plans...

One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the
employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered
by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the
group's stated objective: to "reposition global warming as theory,
rather than fact."

Internet searches of the "reposition
global warming" phrase show how viral it is. However, more searching
reveals former Boston Globe reporter Gelbspan not only has never won a
Pulitzer, despite uncountable times he's described as such, but he is
also not the discoverer of the "campaign." Intensive investigation
reveals only myriad ties to the phrase, but the actual 1991 internal PR
campaign memo containing the phrase is never seen.

Gore's 2004 NY Times review of Gelbspan's then-current second book offered this praise:

Gelbspan's first book, "The Heat Is On" (1997), remains the best,
and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided
financing to a small group of contrarian scientists...In this new book,
Gelbspan focuses his toughest language by far on the coal and oil
industries. After documenting the largely successful efforts of
companies like ExxonMobil to paralyze the policy process, confuse the
American people and cynically "reposition global warming as theory
rather than fact."

Greenpeace director Phil Radford offers more praise in an article describing two people he worked with who most impressed him:

John Passacantando, the former director of Greenpeace, whose
strategic instinct and track record of changing the political landscape
on global warming has made it possible to imagine that solving the
problem could be a reality. And Ross Gelbspan ... who ... uncover[ed]
the scandalous cover up of global warming by polluting companies. Ross
has been the lone voice ... that has inspired countless people, me
included, to demand our country and our future back from the coal and
oil interests behind global warming.

The article also
says Radford worked for Ozone Action. Prior to 1996, their focus was
ozone depletion. Ozone Action had just over/under $1 million worth of
contributions per year in 1998, 1999, and 2000 under John
Passacantando's leadership, who then merged his group into Greenpeace in
2000. Greenpeace archive records of a 1996 Ozone Action report (page 5,
paragraphs 3 & 4) reveal:

...the Information
Council for the Environment (ICE) stated their goal was to "reposition
global warming as theory (not fact)[.]"

According to
documents obtained by Ozone Action and by Ross Gelbspan, several ICE
strategies were laid out: the repositioning of global warming as theory,
not fact.

The word "obtained" prompts questions about
assertions that Gelbspan was the discoverer. Worse, Greenpeace/WWF
activist Andrew Rowell cites the "reposition" phrase in his 1996 Green
Backlash (second paragraph) while not saying where the "ICE internal
packet" came from. NY Times reporter Matthew Wald's July 8, 1991 article
reported:

The goal of the campaign, according to one planning document, is to "reposition global warming as theory" and not fact.

A packet of internal correspondence and other information relating
to the campaign was provided to The New York Times by the Sierra Club,
the San Francisco-based environmental group that favors taking steps to
reduce the risk of global warming.

Curtis Moore, who
cites Wald's article about the "reposition" phrase in his 1994 Green
Gold, also refers to an interview of Simmons Advertising's Tom Helland.
That appears to be the same Simmons contact "T. Helland" seen on page 13
of another set of Greenpeace scans, a fair indication that Moore saw
the documents. And on page 14, there is a Simmons letter describing
"what you'll find in this packet," the same descriptive word in Rowell's
book note and Wald's article. Gelbspan refers to other 1991 articles
breaking this story near the bottom of the page at his website. An
obvious question is: Who discovered these documents?

That second
set of Greenpeace scans contains something vastly more important on page
10: the document with the "reposition" phrase in its complete context.
Of all the internet searches for the phrase, I found no others showing
it in its entirety, or any linking to this Greenpeace scan. In
Gelbspan's own hugely acclaimed 1997 book, no scan is shown. He simply
says, "ICE documents in author's possession." Why is that? And what is
the significance of yet another Greenpeace scan of an October 1996 Kalee
Kreider e-mail to "D Becker" at the Sierra Club? That's probably Dan
Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming Program from 1989
to 2006. Kreider worked at Ozone Action just three months earlier,
repeating the "reposition" phrase in a media release. Many now know
Kreider as Al Gore's spokesperson.

It turns out that the
attempted slander of global warming skeptics as tools of big oil is as
poorly grounded as the theory itself.

Last
November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were
released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists
engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of
both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist
Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The
scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent
review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last
week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and
paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of
East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell,
former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Mr. Russell
took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other
academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that "Given the
nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to
either the university or the climate science community looks at the
evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find."

No
links? One of the panel's four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on
the faculty of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences for 18
years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit
(CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr.
Boulton's school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a
petition declaring that the scientists who established the global
climate records at East Anglia "adhere to the highest levels of
professional integrity."

This purportedly independent review
comes on the heels of two others—one by the University of East Anglia
itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the
spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was
one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly
laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to
destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with
which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also
saw no evil. For example, Penn State "determined that Dr. Michael E.
Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or
indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices
within the academic community."

Readers of both earlier reports
need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal
global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the
grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources,
that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of
substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant
loss of funding.

It's impossible to find anything wrong if you
really aren't looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones,
director of East Anglia's CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line
"IPCC & FOI," "Can you delete any emails you may have had with
Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene
[Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . .
. We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for
Atmospheric Research] to do likewise."

Mr. Jones emailed later
that he had "deleted loads of emails" so that anyone who might bring a
Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to
New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, "Russell and his team never asked
Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this."

The
Russell report states that "On the allegation of withholding
temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold
access to such data." Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to
Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: "We have 25 years
or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you,
when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]"

Then
there's the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific
literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: "On the
allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial
process, we find no evidence to substantiate this."

Really? Mr.
Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been
referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those
measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are
not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious
threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie
Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research
that took exception to Mr. Mann's work, work which also was at variance
with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would
seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of
science.

But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that
"I'll be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do
with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Chris de
Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones
on the same day: "I think we should stop considering 'Climate Research'
as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our
colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this
journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more
reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Mr.
Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that "I think the
community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at
all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and
disrepute."

Climate Research and several other journals have
stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received
wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four
perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU
shenanigans, and I'm hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University
of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it's becoming nearly impossible
to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in
peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, Mr. Russell didn't look to see
if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had
any consequences. That's because they only interviewed CRU people, not
the people whom they had trashed.

A new
book, critical of the climate change establishment, is additionally
noteworthy because the author, Mark Lawson, is a senior journalist who
writes on environmental matters for the Australian Financial Review.

While
large Australian publishers ignore climate warming sceptics a small
publisher, Connor Court, continues to give writers with something to say
a platform and the opportunity to be read by an ever growing
readership:

A Guide to Climate Change Lunacy: bad forecasting, terrible solutions

Mark Lawson, Connor Court Publishers, paperback, 286 pages. $29.95.

Activists
and even some scientists will tell you that the science behind the
expected major warming of the globe is rock solid. In fact, the
projections of temperature increases in coming decades are based on
entirely unproven forecasting systems which depend on guesses about
crucial aspects of the atmosphere behaviour and the all-important
oceans. In addition, these forecasts use carbon dioxide emission
scenarios that have been generated by economic calculations rather than
from science, and parts of which are already hopelessly wrong less than a
decade after they were made.

As Mark Lawson explains in this
book, in layman’s language, this lunacy has been compounded by further
forecasts based on these already deeply flawed projections and combined
with active imaginations, to produce wild statements about what will
happen to plant, animal, bird and marine life, as well as coral reefs,
hurricanes, sea levels, agriculture and polar ice caps. The books shows
that these projections are little more than fantasy.

On top of
all this lunacy activists, aided and abetted by some scientists, have
proposed a range of solutions to the supposed problem that are either
never going to work, such as an international agreement to cut
emissions, or are overly complicated and expensive for no proven return,
such as carbon trading systems and wind energy. None of these proposals
have been shown to be of any use in reducing carbon emissions, outside
of theoretical studies. Where wind energy has been used in substantial
amounts overseas the sole, known result has been very expensive
electricity for no observed saving in emissions.

Mark Lawson is a
senior journalist on the Australian Financial Review. He has a science
degree from Melbourne University, and has been a science writer,
editorial writer and Perth bureau chief for the Review. He now edits a
series of reports for the AFR, including environmental reports.

If
they do die out, Australia's got about a billion rabbits that they
would gladly donate to anyone who wants to come and take them away!

Discussing:
Millar, C.I. and Westfall, R.D. 2010. Distribution and climatic
relationships of the American Pika (Ochotona princeps) in the Sierra
Nevada and Western Great Basin, U.S.A.; periglacial landforms as refugia
in warming climates. Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 42: 76-88.

Background

American
pikas are small generalist herbivores that are relatives of rabbits and
hares. They tend to inhabit patchily-distributed rocky slopes of
western North American mountains and are good at tolerating cold.
However, they are widely believed to have a physiological sensitivity to
warming, which when "coupled with the geometry of decreasing area at
increasing elevation on mountain peaks," in the words of the authors,
"has raised concern for the future persistence of pikas in the face of
climate change," so much so, in fact, that "the species has been
petitioned under California [USA] state and federal laws for endangered
species listing."

What was done

Millar and Westfall
developed a rapid assessment method for determining pika occurrence and
used it "to assess geomorphic affinities of pika habitat, analyze
climatic relationships of sites, and evaluate refugium environments for
pikas under warming climates," while working over the course of two
field seasons in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, the
southwestern Great Basin of California and Nevada, and the central Great
Basin of Nevada, as well as a small area in the central Oregon
Cascades.

What was learned

The two U.S. Forest Service
researchers report that "whereas concern exists for diminishing range of
pikas relative to early surveys, the distribution and extent in our
study, pertinent to four subspecies and the Pacific southwest lineage of
pikas, resemble the diversity range conditions described in early
20th-century pika records (e.g., Grinnell and Storer, 1924)." In fact,
they say that the lowest site at which they detected the current
presence of pikas at an elevation of 1827 meters "is below the historic
lowest elevation of 2350 m recorded for the subspecies by Grinnell and
Storer (1924) in Yosemite National Park; below the low elevation range
limit for the White Mountains populations given by Howell (1924) at 2440
m; and below the lowest elevation described for the southern Sierra
Nevada populations of 2134 m (Sumner and Dixon, 1953)." In addition,
they report that "a similar situation occurred for another lagomorph of
concern, pygmy rabbit (Brachylagus idahoensis), where a rapid assessment
method revealed much wider distribution than had been implied from
historic population databases or resurvey efforts (Himes and Drohan,
2007)."

What it means

Millar and Westfall say their
results suggest that "pika populations in the Sierra Nevada and
southwestern Great Basin are thriving, persist in a wide range of
thermal environments, and show little evidence of extirpation or
decline," over a period of time, we might add, when the world's climate
alarmists claim the planet warmed at a rate and to a level of warmth
that was unprecedented over the past one to two millennia, which
suggests to us that current concerns about the future of American pikas
in a warming world may be wildly misplaced. Moreover, the documentation
of a similar phenomenon operating among pygmy rabbits suggests that
still other animals may also be better able to cope with various aspects
of climate change than we have been led to believe possible.

* 1938 -
Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide,
“is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the
provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal
Meteorological Society

* 1938 - “Experts puzzle over 20 year
mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout
the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer
climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune

* 1939 -
“Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are
quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the
time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post

* 1952 - “…we
have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half
century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962

* 1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times

* 1969 - “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the
North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York
Times, February 20th, 1969

* 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I
would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ —
Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote
only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of
overpopulation)

* 1970 - “…get a good grip on your long
johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no
relief in sight” – Washington Post

* 1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine

* 1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly
apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the
harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post

* 1974 - “As
for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have
concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a
Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its
analysis of the danger

* 1974 - “…the facts of the present
climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign
near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and
probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times

* 1975 -
Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling
Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975

* 1975 - “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside
nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for
mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in
International Wildlife Magazine

* 1976 - “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report

* 1981 - Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times

* 1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one,
the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of
instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large
enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and
effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our
computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is
already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme
events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony
before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for
context

* 1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are
ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must
include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other
hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most
people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context
translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially
disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based
support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means
getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any
doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find
ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide
what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I
hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October
1989

* 1990 - “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the
right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” –
Senator Timothy Wirth

* 1993 - “Global climate change may
alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with
uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report

* 1998 - No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . .
. climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about
justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian
Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998

* 2001 -
“Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost
nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.”
– Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001

* 2003 - Emphasis on
extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public
and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming
issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands
were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming
activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003

*
2006 - “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of
factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening
up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it
is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine,
May 2006

* Now: The global mean temperature has fallen for
four years in a row, which is why you stopped hearing details about the
actual global temperature, even while they carry on about taxing you to
deal with it…how long before they start predicting an ice age?

THE
federal government's billion-dollar green car scheme has stalled on the
starting grid. The first subsidised project, Toyota's locally built
hybrid, is selling well below expectations despite a booming vehicle
market.

The Hybrid Camry, which began rolling off its Melbourne
assembly lines six months ago, was expected to attract 10,000 buyers
this year, but fewer than 3000 had been registered at the halfway mark,
this week's figures reveal.

A string of record months for vehicle
sales and an aggressive marketing campaign by Toyota failed to
stimulate demand for the Hybrid Camry, hailed as a new era in Australian
manufacturing by Kevin Rudd when he launched it in December, just
before he flew to Copenhagen for the ill-fated climate change summit,
and the project was granted $35 million from the green car scheme.

A
sales breakdown of customer types, obtained by The Weekend Australian,
shows 571 of the 2960 sales are awaiting test drives in dealerships or
being used by Toyota, while the customers Toyota was hoping to attract
are shunning the car, which costs $36,990.

Business fleets have
bought 506 Hybrid Camrys, with taxi and rental operations accounting for
another 333. Private buyers, who were expected to account for 3000
sales a year, took just 657.

By far the biggest buyers are
governments, mostly state governments, which have bought 755. The
Victorian government committed to purchasing 2000 before the price was
announced.

The Toyota Prius, launched as a new model a year ago,
is also underperforming, with sales down 16 per cent to 1019 to the end
of last month, despite Toyota's forecast of 4500 buyers this year.

Consumer
research by Roy Morgan shows most potential buyers baulk at the
starting price of hybrids, even though the petrol-electric cars are
cheaper to run.

As well as the $35m from Canberra, the Victorian
government injected money into the project but has refused to reveal how
much, with estimates ranging from $15m to $35m....

Other green
car projects include Holden's plan to return small-car manufacturing to
Australia with the Cruze, which attracted $149m in funding, and Ford's
four-cylinder Falcon and diesel Territory, which got $42m. All are due
on sale next year.

With its local Hybrid Camry and the new Prius
in the market, Toyota expected demand for hybrids to blossom to 15,000
cars a year -- triple the best result. However, a decade after the
technology was first offered, it remains the least successful
alternative fuel option and has yet to muster 1 per cent of the market.
This is despite a 17 per cent rebound in vehicle demand this year, a
result that has taken the industry by surprise.

Buyers shopping
for cheap-to-run cars have turned to diesels, as stricter fuel standards
have encouraged importers to introduce a wave of new models, mainly
from Europe, Japan and Korea.

This
week, much of the US, particularly the Northeast, experienced a heat
wave. Immediately the chorus of global warmers began the refrain "The
Hottest Year Ever." NASA GISS started some time ago and now NOAA has
joined in. (Please see "heat wave" below.)

Readers of TWTW may
recall that earlier this year when much of the inhabited Northern
Hemisphere was extremely cold, Roy Spencer was reporting that the
average satellite measured global temperature was well above normal -
most likely from the El Ni¤o, that was then occurring. The average
atmospheric temperature has been dropping since March, but Spencer
reports in June the average temperature was still 0.44 deg. C above the
norm for the entire record from Jan. 1979 to June 2010. (Please see here.)

The
temperatures for the first six months of this year average a bit below
the peak year of 1998, which corresponded with a strong El Ni¤o. John
Christy says the difference is not statistically significant. Of course,
the IPCC and the global warming chorus do not recognize that El Ni¤os
may cause global warming, claiming that the events are too short. But if
they do, and if the El Ni¤o continues to abate, then NOAA and NASA GISS
would have committed the logical fallacy of hasty generalization and
the chorus will have some explaining to do.

The NOAA
announcement, below, is based on land and sea surface data. Joe D'Aleo
and Anthony Watts have exposed the NOAA land data as biased. (Please see
the report which was updated in June here). (For an update on some US stations please see here).

NOAA
reports that the May sea surfaces were the second highest on record,
the highest being in 1998. However, Roy Spencer reports on June 17 that
sea surface temperatures as measured by satellites are plunging as the
El Ni¤o subsides.

The satellite measurements by the AMSR-E
instruments started in 2002. Just as it will be interesting to compare
NASA GISS calculated data for the Arctic later this summer with the
Danish instrument observations, it will be interesting to compare the
NOAA announcements of sea surface temperature with the AMSR-E
measurements. If both the NOAA and the satellite measurements show a
fall with the subsidence of the El Ni¤o, then the NOAA research will
affirm the importance of El Ni¤o events and the IPCC may be forced to
consider El Ni¤os as a natural cause of global warming (not likely).

*************************************************

Last week, we began a brief review of Roy Spencer's new book, The Great Global Warming Blunder.
Spencer describes how, using data from the new CERES satellite
instruments and a home computer, he created a simple, one-equation
climate model. Spencer thinks he has separated the feedback signal from
the forcing signal in the data, and that the net feedback from carbon
dioxide warming is negative. If so, the upper bound of warming from a
doubling of carbon dioxide is no more than 1.1ø C, (2ø F) and Spencer
thinks it may be as little as one-half that.

After estimating
that feedbacks are negative, Spencer develops his thoughts that clouds
are the primary cause of temperature change over the 20th Century.
Clouds are virtually ignored by the IPCC reports and assumed to be
constant except as a feedback of warming from CO2 forcing (warming
causes fewer clouds). Anyone who has read HH Lamb may find the IPCC's
position of considering clouds a constant surprising, because Lamb
presents contemporary evidence indicating that, in Europe at least,
during the Little Ice Age the skies were generally overcast with low
clouds having a cooling effect.

Spencer then develops his
argument that the principal driver in changing cloud cover is the
naturally changing Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). He states that the
PDO alone explains most of the temperature change for the 20th Century
and 75% of the 20th Century warming. If so, the recent changes
temperatures are a result of natural oscillation in the climate system
itself.

Spencer's work demands a hard look from climate
researchers. The models used by the IPCC produce a wide range of
results, in part because the varying models contain a wide range of
feedback estimates. This wide range, in turn, indicates there is
something wrong with the procedures used to estimate feedback. Thus,
feedback remains a varying assumption in the models. Until the
assumptions are fully tested, climate science as articulated by the IPCC
remains a giant logical fallacy - Petitio Principii - that which must
be proven is assumed (to be true).

****************************************

The
number of the week is 3. Three separate British entities have
investigated ClimateGate and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU): a select
committee of the House of Commons, the Oxburgh Commission of the Royal
Society, and the Muir Russell team (MR) which is the subject of today's
science editorial. Three separate British entities have failed to
investigate the science. Three for three - a trifecta. Is it that the
CRU does not do science? As reader Tom Sheahen points out following
quote from item 23 in the MR summary is revealing: "We do not find that
it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to
splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have
been made plain - ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described
in either the caption or the text."

********************************************

Cap
and tax appears to be disappearing from the agenda of the US Congress.
The latest word is that Congress will leave a week early for its summer
recess and not return until mid-September. The indications are that the
November election will be very bloody for incumbents. This has created
speculation that the administration and Congressional leaders may try a
"lame duck" session after the election, but before the new Congress
comes into session, in order to enact bills that are opposed by the
public. (Please see the comments by Steve Malloy under Articles.)

********************************************

The
new NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, announced that President Obama
has given him three principal objectives - none of which are directly
related to space research. (Please see "U.S. Space Program Bows to
Mecca" under Articles).

*********************************************

BP
appears to be ahead of schedule to cap the well that is releasing oil
into the Gulf of Mexico. It is probably prudent to proceed carefully to
do the job properly. However, there is no excuse for the lack of a
"sense of urgency" which the administration has demonstrated in cleaning
up the consequences of the spill.

In
contrast to the Oxburgh report, the Muir-Russell (MR) report is quite
substantive (160 pp, incl 8 appendices) and very professionally
produced. MR members held some dozen meetings (presumably in Edinburgh),
conducted many interviews at UAE, and accepted some 100 submissions
(all unpublished). [A very few of these came from recognizable skeptics;
none from Douglass, Christy or Singer, although our work is referred to
on pp 148-149 -- as a threat to Jones?]

I have several major
criticisms, mostly connected to the fact that the MR team had no
in-house competence in the relevant science (atmospheric physics and
meteorology). Prof Geoffrey Boulton is a geologist, Prof Peter Clarke is
a particle physicist, and Professor James Norton seems to be a general
expert on engineering and business. Sir Muir Russell himself once got a
degree in natural philosophy (physics). As far as one can tell, they
consulted only supporters of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), i.e.,
supporters of the IPCC.

As a result, they could not really judge
whether Phil Jones (head of the Climate Research Unit at UEA)
manipulated the post-1980 temperature data, both by selection of weather
stations and by applying certain corrections to individual records. Had
they spoken to Joe D'Aleo or to Anthony Watts, they might have gotten a
different slant on the CRU's handling of station data.

The MR
Team concentrates much of the report on the `hockey stick,' and on
whether the 20th century was the warmest in the past 1000 years (as
claimed by Michael Mann and also by IPCC-3, relying mainly on tree-ring
data,). But that issue is really irrelevant and a distraction from the
main question (which is never addressed): is the warming of the past 50
years mainly anthropogenic (as claimed by IPCC-4) or natural (as
asserted by NIPCC and some other IPCC critics)?

In pursuing the
question, the Team must realize that the CRU deals only with land data
(covering, imperfectly, only 30% of the Earth's surface) and that
sea-surface temperatures (SST) are really more important. Weather
stations and trees tend to be land-based.

Also, the Team never
bothers to inquire about the atmospheric temperature record from
satellites, the only high-quality and truly global record in existence.
They seem unaware of the substantial disparity between satellites and
the CRU record.

In defense of the MR Team, they consider science
to be outside of their charter and within the remit of the Oxburgh team.
[See Item 5 on p.10] (Having seen the Oxburgh report, however, some
might consider this a joke.) Yet the Team feels empowered to speak with
authority about conclusions that depend on climate science. In fact,
none of the investigations so far have had a serious look at the crucial
science issues.

As a result, the Team doesn't seem to realize
[p.23 and 32] that "hide the decline" and "Mike's [Michael Mann] `trick"
refers to a cover-up. Mann's 1000-yr temperature record (from proxies)
suddenly stops at 1980 - not because there are no suitable post-1980
proxy data (as Mann has claimed in e-mails that responded to inquiries),
but because they do not show the dramatic temperature rise of Jones'
thermometer data.

This problem recurs again with Fig 6.2 (which
is Fig 3.1 from IPCC-4) and involves misuse of the `smoothing'
procedure, i.e., replacing annual temperatures with a `running average'
of (usually) five years and sometimes longer. [I discussed the matter in
some detail in my Science Editorial 8-09 (2-28-2009)]. As can be seen
by inspection, there is little rise in temperature between 1980 and
1996, until the `super-El-Nino' of 1998 (which has nothing to do with GH
gases or AGW). The satellite record shows more clearly the absence of
any significant temperature rise between 1979 and 1997.

It is
ironic then that the real post-1980 global temperatures may be closer to
the proxy record than to the thermometer record. We will find out when
we learn what data Michael Mann discarded.

In this connection,
the legal demand for all of Mann's data by Virginia's Attorney-General
Ken Cuccinelli assumes additional significance. Based on his own
statements, one suspects that Jones has deleted some crucial e-mails. It
is likely that these may be discovered among Mann's e-mails, now held
by the University of Virginia. It might put a new light on the whole
Climategate affair.

Parliament
was misled and needs to re-examine the Climategate affair thoroughly
after the failure of the Russell report, a leading backbench MP told us
today.

"It's not a whitewash, but it is inadequate," is Labour MP
Graham Stringer's summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is
the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and
Technology with scientific qualifications - he holds a PhD in Chemistry.

Not
only did Russell fail to deal with the issues of malpractice raised in
the emails, Stringer told us, but he confirmed the feeling that MPs had
been misled by the University of East Anglia when conducting their own
inquiry. Parliament only had time for a brief examination of the CRU
files before the election, but made recommendations. This is a serious
charge.

After the Select Committee heard oral evidence on March
1, MPs believed that Anglia had entrusted an examination of the science
to a separate inquiry. Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia
Edward Acton had told the committee that "I am hoping, later this week,
to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure
there is nothing wrong."[Hansard - Q129]]

Ron Oxburgh's inquiry
eventually produced a short report clearing the participants. He did not
reassess the science, and now says it was never in his remit. "The
science was not the subject of our study," he confirmed in an email to
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.

Earlier this week the former
chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, now Lord
Willis, said MPs had been amazed at the "sleight of hand".

"Oxburgh didn't go as far as I expected. The Oxburgh Report looks much more like a whitewash," Graham Stringer told us.

"Why
did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for
doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central
motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell."

Stringer
also says that it was unacceptable for Russell (who is not a scientist)
to conclude that CRU's work was reproducible, when the data needed was
not available. He goes further:

"The fact that you can make up
your own experiments and get similar results doesn't mean that you're
doing what's scientifically expected of you. You need to follow the same
methodology of the process."

"I was surprised at Phil Jones'
answers to the questions I asked him [in Parliament]. The work was never
replicable," says Stringer.

In 2004 Jones had declined to give
out data that would have permitted independent scrutiny of their work,
explaining that "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should
I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find
something wrong with it."

This policy is confirmed several times
in the emails, with Jones also advising colleagues to destroy evidence
helpful to people wishing to reproduce the team's results. "I think
that's quite shocking," says Stringer.

Thirdly, the University of
East Anglia failed to follow the Commons Select Committee's
recommendations in handling the inquiry and producing the report.

Stringer
said, "We asked them to be independent, and not allow the University to
have first sight of the report. The way it's come out is as an UEA
inquiry, not an independent inquiry."

Stringer also says they
reminded the inquiry to be open - Russell had promised as much - but
witness testimony took place behind closed doors, and not all the
depositions have been published.

How independent was the panel?
Muir Russell's team heard only one side of the story, failing to call
witnesses who were the subjects of the emails - Stephen McIntyre of
Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive - who
may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate
scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU
team's behaviour - Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent
sceptics, for example - summoned. Stringer feels their presence would
have provided vital context.

The panel included Richard Horton,
editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate
change (in 2007 he described global warming "the biggest threat to our
future health") and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK
government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East
Anglia - the institution under apparently 'independent' scrutiny.

In
several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt
because a precedent had been set - often by the academics themselves.

The
British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct.
The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion
exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the
Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.

For Stringer, policy
needs to be justified by the evidence. "Vast amounts of money are going
to be spent on climate change policy, it's billions and eventually
could be trillions. Knowing what is accurate and what is inaccurate is
important."

"I view this as a Parliamentarian for one of the
poorest constituencies in the country. Putting up the price of fuel for
poor people on such a low level of evidence, hoping it will have the
desired effect, is not acceptable. I need to know what's going on."

Climategate
may finally be living up to its name. If you recall, it wasn't the
burglary or use of funding that led to the impeachment of Nixon, but the
cover-up. Now, ominously, three inquiries into affair have raised more
questions than there were before.

Climate
change isn't a threat. CO2 isn't a significant factor. But the action
we're proposing to take on climate mitigation will devastate our Western
economies and impoverish a whole generation.

Over the last
hundred years, mean global temperatures have increased by 0.7 of a
degree Centigrade. That's all. The whole climate scare is all about a
fraction of a degree. According to Professor Phil Jones of the infamous
Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, there has been
no significant warming for the last 15 years.

And the slight
warming we have seen is entirely consistent with well-established,
long-term natural climate cycles. We had the Roman Optimum (warm); the
Dark Ages (cool); the Medieval Warm Period; and the Little Ice Age (when
they had ice-fairs on the River Thames in London). Over the last couple
of centuries, we've been moving into what seems to be a new 21st
Century Optimum. It's rightly called an "Optimum." Generally speaking,
human societies do better in warmer weather.

When I raised this
with the European Commission, they told me that recent changes were so
sharp and rapid that they must be man-made. But 12,000 years ago in the
Younger Dryas cold climate period, at the beginning of the current
Interglacial, we saw temperature change at 10 times that rate. And there
wasn't an SUV to be seen.

When I was at Cambridge in the 1960s,
everyone knew that climate was cyclical and was driven largely by
astronomical cycles. And there is good evidence that recent decades have
also seen warming on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system - pointing
to a solar cause.

But the Warmists have the bizarre idea that
only CO2 matters. Certainly CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it's not even
the most important one. That's water vapor, and there's nothing we can
do about it (as long as the wind blows over the ocean).

I'm
horrified that the Environmental Protection Agency has declared CO2 a
pollutant. They might as well declare oxygen a pollutant. We are a
carbon-based life form, and CO2 is vital to the whole biosphere. Higher
levels of atmospheric CO2 drive increased bio-mass formation and
improved crop yields.

Al Gore is excited by a correlation between
mean temperatures and CO2 levels over the past 600,000 years. He's
right about the correlation, but he doesn't mention that the temperature
graph leads the CO2 graph by several hundred years. The inescapable
conclusion is that temperature drives CO2 - not vice versa.

Over
the longer term, the correlation breaks down entirely. Current
atmospheric CO2 levels are quite low in geo-historical terms. They have
been 10 times as high in the past - and that was during an ice age.
There is no tipping point. There is no runaway global warming.

Our
efforts to control climate by reducing emissions are doomed to failure.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge
University Press, 2001), has studied the economics of climate change and
estimates that the European Union's 20 percent emissions-reduction
target will cost around $250 billion a year. Yet the impact by 2100 on
global temperatures is likely to be only 0.05 a degree Centigrade -
almost too small to measure.

"Throughout
my school life we have had talks on climate change, and what we can do
to prevent it. People my age are terrified of what might happen to our
planet" -- Quote from a 15-year old.

The least forgiveable
harm produced by the political success of the IPCC is, in my opinion,
the harm it has done, and will still do, to children. Adults discussing
theories about climate and speculating about disasters is one thing.
But pushing speculations as facts, 'facts' that will scare children, is
quite another.

I suppose that many, perhaps most, of the people
campaigning in and around schools about the climate have no wish to
'scare children witless', to quote from (3), but it is hard to see how
their vivid preoccupation with doom-laden speculations can do anything
else. Some will see through them (in due course), some will ignore
them, some will be scared by them.

Here are some recent reports of some that were scared, from three countries:

New Zealand. Source: (1).

'Today's children are worried about more than just their homework and
peer pressure - they are also worried about terrorism and climate change
and whether there will be a future for their own children.

...
Auckland University Researcher Fiona Pienaar interviewed children aged
8-12 for her PhD to find out what stressed them out and how they coped.'

... 'Global warming and how a natural disaster would affect their lives were two other issues for children.

"I'm
worried about the environment and the global warming, the ice and how
it's going. I write it down in my little notebook ... I'm thinking
people should actually stop the global warming before it's too late for
their children," said one child.

... '"The future, if we have children, would there be a future for them?" asked one child.'

'Ms
Pienaar said that in the past children tended to think of themselves as
immortal but these days things have changed. They are far more exposed
to the media and their parents' stress issues, which has led to a
greater awareness of potentially stressful world issues.'

'When
children have those concerns it can be very distracting and I don't
think it's surprising that we have increasing behaviour problems,
increasing diagnosis of childhood anxiety disorders and childhood
depression.'

USA. Source: (2).

'An article by Johanna
Sorrentino at Education.com (titled "Get Your Kids Global Warming
Savvy") reveals survey results "of more than 1,000 middle school
students across the country [that] found that kids fear global warming
more than war, terrorism or the health care crisis." Not only does this
statement suggest the US has a non-existent "health care crisis" but it
demonstrates the dangerous power of misinformation in education.
Sorrentino's article is full of the very misinformation that leads to
the unwarranted fear children have about "global warming."'

The
source article, by Bob Webster, goes on to explain why, and he also
recommends a book for children on climate: "... parents who want to
provide a good education about global warming and climate change (and
how teachers are misleading students), there is an excellent book for
"kids [who] fear global warming more than war, terrorism or the health
care crisis." It is The Sky's Not Falling - Why It's OK to Chill about
Global Warming (for children and adults) by Holly Fretwell ....

Well
organized, this book presents a fairly comprehensive view of climate
change and global warming designed to calm any fears children may have
from gross exaggerations they may have heard at school, on TV, or in
other media. While the book is written for children, it is excellent for
adults whose education failed to prepare them to understand why the
notion that humans can cause "climate change" is absurd.'

UK. Source: (3).

'Today,
it is not the mushroom cloud that threatens to suffocate children
psychologically but carbon emissions. The new bogeyman is climate
change: submerger of nations, polluter of skies, slayer of polar bears.'

Here
is one 15 year old quoted in the article: 'Throughout my school life
we have had talks on climate change, and what we can do to prevent it.
People my age are terrified of what might happen to our planet; it has
been drilled into our brains at school, home and even on TV. We watch
the news and see earthquakes, flooding, tsunamis, and we hope that by
the time we are our parents' ages we will not be having to cope with
these routinely.'

Some more disturbing quotes are in the article,
but here is one by the journalist who wrote it: 'Teaching children
about man-made climate change - which is very real and threatens our
wellbeing - and persuading them to adopt green habits is essential, but
it can be done without scaring them witless.'

Note the casual and
confident assertion that 'man -made climate change ... is very real and
threatens our wellbeing'. Not surprising, since this is the
establishment view. But shocking, all the same. Can the journalist
argue a case to defend her assertions, or would she resort to appealing
to the 'authority' of the IPCC? I suspect she has acquired her opinion
because there is a lot of it about, like some kind of 'flu.

Not
all journalists have caught the infection, thank goodness. Here is a
recent piece in the Washington Times which is sensible about climate
change: (4).

But it is not just passive exposure to the media and
their parents. There is a widespread and generously funded level of
deliberate pushing of climate change concerns on to children. I am
accumulating lists of sites that produce propaganda aimed at children,
or entice them into climate-related networking groups, or 'action
groups', or provide materials and project ideas for parents and teachers
to push the IPCC line on climate.

I plan to publish my 'list
so far', in the near future. In the meantime, there is an illustrated
list of 16 'climate propaganda' sites here (5), and of these, at least 4
are specifically aimed at children. And, to end on a postive note,
here is a UK link to Amazon for the book mentioned earlier (6). I have
this book, and I thoroughly recommend it.

(Cambridge,
England) Scientists have apparently created new justification for
shutting down civilization. Habitat loss and climate change are now
considered dire threats to millions of imaginary plants, which patiently
await protection after discovery.

Faced with threats like habitat loss and climate change, many thousands of rare flowering plant species worldwide may become extinct even before discovery.

'Scientists
have estimated that there could be five million to 50 million of such
species, but less than two million of these have been discovered till
date,' says Lucas Joppa from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain,
who authored the study.

Joppa, who received his doctorate from
Duke University this year, said: 'Using novel methods, we were able to
refine the estimate of total species for flowering plants and calculate
how many of those remain undiscovered.' [.]

'This finding has
enormous conservation implications, as unknown species are likely to be
overwhelmingly rare and threatened,' says Joppa, according to a
Microsoft Research release.

As a consequence, I suspect we'll soon see conservation programs and policies to protect imaginary plant life.

Meanwhile,
could someone explain to me the scientific logic expressed by the Duke
doctor that "unknown species are likely to be overwhelmingly rare and
threatened." First, how can one say that a species is rare or
threatened if it doesn't exist? Second, what's the difference between
"overwhelmingly rare" and "rare?"

Furthermore, how on Earth does
one protect plants that are "extinct even before discovery?"
Additionally, what the hell does that even mean?

Frankly, I
suggest that the research is simply cascading guesses by
ideologically-driven, global-warming academics who arrogantly believe
they can save the planet from human influence and, sooner or later, the
results of the research will be pulled out to support
government-mandated carbon trading.

Science
proceeds not by "proving" anything but by examining theories and seeing
if they appear to account for anything. The starting point is always a
skeptical one: That a proposed theory accounts for nothing that is
actually observed in the real world. That is the null hypothesis. If
the null hypothesis cannot be disproved, the theory behind it is
abandoned. The following paper shows that the null hypothesis is not
falsified by the CO2 theory of global warming (i.e. it adds nothing to
our understanding of events). Hence that theory should be abandoned

A null hypothesis for CO2

By Roy Clark

Abstract

Energy
transfer at the Earth's surface is examined from first principles. The
effects on surface temperature of small changes in the solar constant
caused by the sunspot cycle and small increases in downward long wave
infrared (LWIR) flux due to a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration are considered in detail. The changes in the solar
constant are sufficient to change ocean temperatures and alter the
Earth's climate. The surface temperature changes produced by an increase
in downward LWIR flux are too small to be measured and cannot cause
climate change. The assumptions underlying the use of radiative forcing
in climate models are shown to be invalid. A null hypothesis for CO2 is
proposed that it is impossible to show that changes in CO2 concentration
have caused any climate change, at least since the current composition
of the atmosphere was set by ocean photosynthesis about one billion
years ago.Keywords

The authors developed a
high-resolution record of ocean and climate variations during the late
Holocene in the Fram Strait (the major gateway between the Arctic and
North Atlantic Oceans, located north of the Greenland Sea), based on
detailed analyses of a sediment core recovered from a location
(78°54.931'N, 6°46.005'E) on the slope of the western continental margin
of Svalbard, based on analyses of organic-walled dinoflagellate cysts
that permit the reconstruction of sea-surface conditions in both summer
and winter. These latter reconstructions, in their words, "were made
using two different approaches for comparison and to insure the
robustness of estimates." They were "the modern analogue technique,
which is based on the similarity degree between fossil and modern
spectra" and "the artificial neural network technique, which relies on
calibration between hydrographical parameters and assemblages."

What was learned

Bonnet
et al. report that the sea surface temperature (SST) histories they
developed via the two techniques they employed were "nearly identical
and show oscillations between -1°C and 5.5°C in winter and between 2.4°C
and 10.0°C in summer," and their graphical results indicate that
between 2500 and 250 years before present (BP), the mean SSTs of summers
were warmer than those of the present about 80% of the time, while the
mean SSTs of winters exceeded those of current winters approximately 75%
of the time, with the long-term (2250-year) means of both seasonal
periods averaging about 2°C more than current means.

The highest
temperatures of all were recorded in the vicinity of 1320 cal. years BP,
during a warm interval that persisted from about AD 500 to 720 during
the very earliest stages of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when the
peak summer and winter temperatures of the MWP both exceeded the peak
summer and winter temperatures of the first several years of the 21st
century by about 3°C.

What it means

These several
observations, as well as the many similar findings we have described in
our Medieval Warm Period Project, clearly indicate there is nothing
unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the world's current level of
warmth, which further suggests there is no compelling reason to
attribute the Little Ice Age-to-Current Warm Period transition to the
concomitant historical increase in the air's CO2 content.

Discussing:
Mazepa, V.S. 2005. Stand density in the last millennium at the upper
tree-line ecotone in the Polar Ural Mountains. Canadian Journal of
Forest Research 35: 2082-2091.

Background

Noting that
"dead trees located above the current tree-line ecotone provide evidence
of the dynamic behavior in the location of the tree line in the recent
past (Shiyatov, 1993, 2003)," Mazepa reports that "previous studies have
concluded that increases in tree-line elevation, and associated
increases in tree abundance within the transient tree-line ecotone, are
associated with extended warm periods (Tranquillini, 1979; Kullman,
1986; Payette et al., 1989; Lloyde and Fastie, 2003; Lloyd et al., 2003;
Grace et al., 2002; Helama et al., 2004)." Consequently, similar data
were used by Mazepa to evaluate the uniqueness of Polar Ural tree-line
and density response "to what is widely considered to be anomalous
20th-century warming."

What was done

The author's
research, which was conducted over the period 1999-2001, extends the
earlier (1960-1962) work of Shiyatov - who examined evidence of tree
growth dynamics along a continuous altitudinal transect 860 meters long
and 40-80 meters wide on the eastern slope of the Polar Ural Mountains
(66°48'57"N, 65°34'09"E) - by repeating what Shiyatov had done four
decades earlier.

What was learned

Most importantly, Mazepa
reports that "a large number of well-preserved tree remains can be
found up to 60-80 meters above the current tree line, some dating to as
early as a maximum [our italics] of 1300 years ago," and that "the
earliest distinct maximum in stand density [our italics] occurred in the
11th to 13th centuries, coincident with Medieval climatic warming."

What it means

Based
on Mazepa's statement that "the vertical gradient of summer air
temperature in the Polar Urals is 0.7°C/100 m," the large number of tree
remains found 60-80 meters above the current tree line suggests that
either (1) there must have been an extended period of time when summer
air temperatures were 0.42-0.56°C warmer than they were over the last
decades of the 20th century or (2) if late-20th-century warmth was as
warm as it was as long ago as AD 700, it has not been maintained
anywhere near long enough to produce the type of tree growth of that
earlier period, which based upon Mazepa's stand density data likely
continued to approximately AD 1300.

I
attended the first two International Climate Change Conferences when
they were held in New York City, but a change of venue to the hometown
of The Heartland Institute, Chicago, was enough to discourage someone
like myself who no longer enjoys travel of any kind for any reason.

The
most recent Heartland conference was held May 16-18 and drew over 800
people from nearly thirty nations. I “attended” electronically, watching
the proceedings that were broadcast by Pajamas Media via the Internet.

My
friend, Joseph Bast, is the founder The Heartland Institute and, in a
recent issue of The Heartlander, he wrote a revealing and insightful
article, “There’s Nothing Mainstream About Old Media”, that says much
about the state of journalism in America today.

“Heartland’s
first international conference on Climate Change generated 124 print
articles with a total circulation of nine million readers. It was
covered by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today,
Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, three of the four television
networks, and dozens of publications outside the U.S.”

Though
Bast did not say so, I can tell you that the bulk of the coverage was an
effort to disparage the conference’s proceedings, devoted to debunking
the global warming hoax.

The Fourth conference in May featured
world-famous physicists from Russia and Israel, and the U.S..; two
astronauts including one who walked on the moon…” Also addressing the
attendees were the two men who exposed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change “hockey stick” fraud in which a deliberately
fraudulent graph conveyed the notion of a rapidly warming planet.

The
blogger who broke the Climategate story in November 2009 that revealed
how IPCC “scientists” had deliberately distorted their “research” to
further the global warming hoax was there along with eighty elected
officials, and many others who have steadfastly questioned global
warming claims, some for decades, until it finally began to die of its
own dead weight.

Guess how many from the “mainstream media” covered the Fourth Conference? None!

This
was and is literally a conspiracy of silence and, as Bast points out,
“It is unethical for a reporter to refuse to report that so many
prominent scientists and policy experts believe the fear of global
warming is overblown. It is unethical to boycott an important event with
major public policy importance.”

Keep in mind that the Obama
administration’s desperate effort to push through Cap-and-Trade
legislation, a huge tax on all energy use, is entirely based on global
warming and the lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are “causing”
it.

There have been many studies by journalism research centers
that have long since established the liberal allegiance of the vast bulk
of journalists working in the so-called mainstream media today,
newspapers and news magazines, radio and television news outlets.

“This
isn’t journalism,” wrote Bast. “It’s advocacy.” And it is advocacy of a
global fraud called global warming. It is the deliberate deception of
millions of Americans and others around the world to further the global
warming fraud.

Noted climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball, writing in
CanadaFreePress.com, asked “How long before politicians realize the
public are simply not on board the climate change alarmism? It can’t be
much longer as economies fail, jobs disappear, markets weaken, and
deficits and debts soar?”

The politicians in Congress and the
mainstream journalists who report on the torrent of global warming lies
from the Oval Office and the Environmental Protection Agency are likely
to be the last to give up on their attempts to fleece the American
public in the name of global warming, climate change, or “green jobs.”

The
new media is, of course, the rise and growth of the Internet and its
many websites and blogs that provide the truth about the global warming
hoax and many other issues that are causing Americans and others around
the world so much grief.

“Best of all, wrote Bast, “most of the
new media is free of the suffocating conceit and arrogance of the
liberal old media that makes most news stories unreliable and every
editorial predictable.”

“If the price of the rise of new media is the death of the old,” wrote Bast, “then I say it is a bargain.”

IT
IS not the cavalier attitude toward his wife or the incredible
stupidity of a public figure putting himself into a morally compromising
position that constitutes Gore’s most important moral failing. Rather,
it has to do with the environment.

Let me explain. I love nature and I believe with all my heart in protecting the environment.

I
am never more alive as when I get away from bricks and mortar out into
open fields, forests, rivers, and mountains. Every year I take my kids
way off the beaten track and as deep into nature as I can immerse them
for our summer vacation. I want to teach them reverence for the beauty
of creation and how it is a sin to pollute God’s green Earth.

So
why aren’t I grateful to Al Gore for highlighting the environment?
Simply put, he overdid it. Saving a tree, however important, is never as
significant as saving a human life.

Stopping a rain forest from being decimated is still subordinate to stopping genocide.

What
Al Gore did was create a level of hysteria that elevated the
environment to the foremost moral cause of our time, even as Africans
continue to die in Darfur, Zimbabweans continue to be brutalized by
Robert Mugabe, Iranians continue to be cut down by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
and Hugo Chavez’s reign of terror intensifies by the day in a once-free
Venezuela.

So many people of goodwill who might have worked to
bring clean water to Africa, to stop the scourge of AIDS or to battle
the oppression of women in the Arab world contented themselves with
climbing up trees and ensuring they weren’t cut down. I love the Earth
but I refuse to deify it. Human life is still the crown jewel of
creation.

Some will say that my argument is specious.

How
can you have human life without a healthy Earth to sustain it? My
response is that respecting the Earth and reducing pollution is an
urgent priority, not to mention a godly endeavor. Even those who reject
global warming as a hoax would have to agree that all that black,
belching smoke coming from exhaust pipes and factories can’t be good for
our air quality or world. But when the hysteria over the environment
pushes to the backburner the ending of famine, stopping the spread of
AIDS, fighting terrorist regimes and giving orphans loving homes, our
world is thrown into moral confusion.

Al Gore convinced the world
that the environment was more urgent than even removing Saddam Hussein
from power – an act he condemned and opposed – even as The New York
Times reported that the tyrant killed 800,000 Arabs and 300,000 Kurds. A
true leader is one who teaches his people moral priorities.

Yes, the Earth has a certain sacredness. But it is still the means to the even higher end of the infinite value of human life.

LABOR'S
closest business adviser, Heather Ridout, has warned Julia Gillard to
slow down as the PM prepares to rush out a climate change policy. As
chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, Ms Ridout has offered
consistently strong support to the Labor government and was a member of
the Henry tax review panel.

She told The Weekend Australian
yesterday that it would be "over-reaching" for the government to roll
out a replacement for the emissions trading scheme ahead of the election
and cautioned Ms Gillard to avoid embracing a carbon-tax quick fix,
warning that business was not prepared nor ready.

"It is totally
the wrong atmosphere -- we are getting way ahead of ourselves," Ms
Ridout said. "I think the confidence of business has been really shaken
by the breakdown of the domestic consensus on this issue. Business
doesn't want the government to be in any hurry to come up with this in
the lead-up to the election."

When she replaced Kevin Rudd as
Prime Minister, Ms Gillard identified the government's position on
climate change as one of her key priorities that had to be fixed before
going to the polls. She has sharpened the position on the other two
priorities -- the mining tax and asylum-seekers -- but has since been
embroiled in debates over both.

Criticism is building that Ms
Gillard is moving too quickly to address Labor's policy weaknesses in
her haste to clear the deck for an election.

The government is
considering a suite of measures to reclaim support from voters lost to
the Greens when Mr Rudd ditched the ETS. These include a controversial
idea to place tough new restrictions on all new coal-fired power
stations and a national energy-efficiency target.

Reports this
week have suggested the government is considering setting a price on
carbon pollution, while green groups have urged the government to adopt
an interim carbon tax. "I think we need to develop a deep and lasting
community consensus about pricing carbon," Ms Gillard said yesterday,
declaring herself to be a believer in human-induced climate change.

The
Prime Minister's special taskforce on energy efficiency has concluded
its report to hand to Ms Gillard, calling on her to adopt a national
energy efficiency target. The target will lead to bans on many
energy-sapping appliances being sold in Australia.

The Weekend
Australian understands the government is considering placing an
energy-efficiency target on retailers. They could meet the new target by
buying "white certificates", which represent an amount of energy they
have saved.

In practice, certificates can be awarded for a wide
range of actions, including replacing inefficient heaters or
airconditioners with more efficient models, installing insulation,
improving the thermal efficiency of windows, installing energy efficient
lighting and buying efficient refrigerators.

There is no
national energy efficiency target. Some states have their own energy
efficiency schemes such as the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target and
the NSW Energy Savings Scheme. South Australia also has a scheme that
provides incentives to adopt energy saving measures.

While the
Greens are pushing for a 3 per cent annual energy efficiency target, The
Weekend Australian understands the government's target will be lower.

In
an interview with ABC TV's Lateline this week, Ms Gillard would not be
drawn on whether her climate plans included a carbon tax, declaring she
still supported an emissions trading system from 2012, while saying
there were things the government could do in the meantime.

Although
not wanting a hasty solution, many business figures do want whichever
party is successful at the forthcoming election to set a clear direction
on climate policy. AGL Energy chief executive Michael Fraser said
yesterday a price on carbon was needed to guarantee Australia's energy
future. "It is my firm view that a broad-based cap-and-trade emissions
trading scheme is the best way to deliver least cost solutions for
reducing emissions," he said.

An interim carbon price has been
backed by MPs. One said a carbon tax was now the only option to restore
Labor's battered reputation.

Feedbacks, feedbacks, feedbacks: A new hole in the IPCC climate models

The
whole Warmist scare is based on feedbacks that supposedly will AMPLIFY
the trivial warming we saw in the 20th century. The feedbacks proposed
are little better than guesswork and are in any case just a cherrypick
of possible feedbacks. The research below looks at an unmentioned
feedback: A vegetation-climate feedback. And guess what? Including
that feedback REDUCES the predicted temperature rise

The
authors state that modeling studies in the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) suggest that future
heat waves over Europe will be more severe, longer lasting and more
frequent than those of the recent past, due largely to an
intensification of quasi-stationary anticyclone anomalies accompanying
future warming, citing in support of this statement the publications of
Meehl and Tebaldi (2004) and Della-Marta et al. (2007).

What was done

Jeong
et al., as they describe it, "investigate the impact of
vegetation-climate feedback on the changes in temperature and the
frequency and duration of heat waves in Europe under the condition of
doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration in a series of global climate
model experiments," where land surface processes are calculated by the
Community Land Model (version 3) described by Oleson et al. (2004),
which includes a modified version of the Lund-Potsdam-Jena scheme for
computing vegetation establishment and phenology for specified climate
variables.

What was learned

The six scientists say their
calculations indicate that "the projected warming of 4°C over most of
Europe with static vegetation has been reduced by 1°C as the dynamic
vegetation feedback effects are included," adding that "examination of
the simulated surface energy fluxes suggests that additional greening in
the presence of vegetation feedback effects enhances evapotranspiration
and precipitation, thereby limiting the warming, particularly in the
daily maximum temperature." In addition, they state that "the greening
also tends to reduce the frequency and duration of heat waves."

What it means

Although
Jeong et al.'s findings by no means constitute the final word on the
subject of the ultimate climatic consequences of a doubling of the air's
CO2 content, they indicate just how easily the incorporation of a new
suite of knowledge, in even the best climate models of the day, can
dramatically alter what the IPCC and other climate-alarmist
organizations and individuals purport to be reality. The world of nature
is so extremely complex that it is the height of arrogance -- or depth
of ignorance -- to believe that the world's climate modelers are
anywhere near being able to mathematically represent all that needs to
be mathematically represented in a model of sufficient complexity to
faithfully reproduce what actually happens in the real world of nature,
and over the many orders of magnitude that they are reluctant to
acknowledge are absolutely essential to obtain the answers we all seek,
which are, of course, the correct answers, which are obviously still a
long ways off.

Another disappointing feedback. The more we learn about them, the more pesky these feedbacks become

A
new study is set to rock the boat again by calling into question one of
the more frightening global warming scenarios: 'runaway climate
change'. Under this scenario, rising temperatures speed up processes
that catastrophically increase the rate of global warming – a positive
feedback loop.

One of these processes is an increase in the rate
of carbon dioxide (CO2) production by plants and microorganisms in the
soil caused by an increase in temperature. As CO2 is a greenhouse gas,
it has been suggested this will further increase temperatures, leading
to a further increase in CO2 production until the Earth is too hot for
human life.

Using Fluxnet, a global network of more than 250
'flux towers' to sample CO2 concentrations, a team of researchers from
the Max Planck Institute has found that, actually, temperature has a
much smaller effect on CO2 release than previous studies claimed.

The
researchers, led by Miguel Mahecha, found that the rate at which plants
and microorganisms produce CO2 in ecosystems from tropical rainforests
to savannah does not even double when the temperature increases by 10°C
from one week to the next.

Climate change sceptics might say the new study is
yet another nail in the coffin of the IPCC report, which says:
"Anthropogenic warming could lead to some effects that are abrupt or
irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate
change."

But mainstream scientists will just be pleased that
Fluxnet has given them real-world measurements upon which to base their
computer models.

For
two decades multi-talented former meteorologist and explosives and fire
expert, Martin Hertzberg Ph.D has been a forthright critic of what he
believes are "propagandists” who have cherry-picked climate data
supportive of the views of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and certain international governments. His fiery condemnation of
the theory has become popularised in Internet science blogs such as
Climate Realists that have been quick to pounce on the growing
controversy since the Climategate scandal.

Blasted for his views
by environmentalists, the doctor of Physical Chemistry remains
impervious; continuing to disparage those who support the IPCC. He fires
back at alarmist claims about the possible future effects of increased
greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. Martin is convinced there is
no such ‘back radiation effect’mechanism that may cause catastrophic
runaway global warming; while the term, 'greenhouse gas' he says, also
misleading.

Propaganda and Myths in the Climate Debate

The
retired Navy meteorologist in a Canada Free Press article, further
disputes the greenhouse gas theory and slates what he calls “global
warming alarmists” who create “hysteria based on half-baked computer
models that have never been verified and that are totally our of touch
with reality."

Keenly aware of ad hominems, Hertzberg mocks the
assertion that climate skeptics are right-wing advocates for the oil
lobby by declaring, “I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a
scientist.”

In response to allegations that he a tool of the coal
barons, Hertzberg responded that such a claim “would come as a great
surprise to them, since I spent most of my career advocating for more
stringent safety regulations in their mines.”

Key Issues Regard ‘Fudged Modeling’

Hertzberg
is aligned with the so-called 'hard core' of greenhouse gas theory
skepticism. Unlike noted 'soft' skeptics such as Richard Lindzen who do
not concern themselves with debunking the GHG theory, Hertzberg attacks
the very foundation of the orthodoxy by seeking to debunk the reliance
on the application of the Stefan-Boltzman equations, which although
otherwise valid for flat black body calculations, are over simplified
for Earth’s complex three-dimensional climate.

Like a growing
number of hardcore skeptics he insists our climate should be represented
by 3-D and not the crude two-dimensional models beloved of the IPCC.

The
former navy man says, “Even for those portions of Earth that are not
covered with clouds, the assumption that the ocean surface, land
surfaces, or ice and snow cover would all have blackbody emissivities of
unity, is unreasonable.”

His studies have led him to the
conclusion that the so-called back radiation effect of greenhouse gas
theory is bogus. He writes, “It is implausible to expect that small
changes in the concentration of any minor atmospheric constituent such
as carbon dioxide, can significantly influence that radiative balance.”

Increased Awareness since ‘Café Scientifique’ Talk

In
recent times Hertzberg has gone further on the offensive with
forthright and outspoken articles such as in Summit Daily News and with
his ‘Café Scientifique’ presentation at Frisco, Colorado (April 27,
2010). A series of seven videos on Youtube shows the “Café Scientifique”
talk in full, which has helped to garner further interest in his work.

The
former Stanford scientist expounds many compelling points including
those made in his paper ‘Earths’ Radiative Equilibrium in the Solar
Irradiance,’ where he observed the small fluctuations in 20th Century
temperatures were of no more concern that “the larger, longer-term
variations of Glacial Coolings and Interglacial Warmings.” In other
words, of natural and uncontrollable origin.

A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?

In
May 2010 Hertzberg joined forces with two other scientists dismissive
of GHG theory, Alan Siddons and Hans Schreuder to produce a seminal
paper, “ A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?” The ground-breaking joint
paper makes strident claims that the calculations inputted to orthodox
climate computer models are so fudged that if they were applied to
Earth's moon they would also prove a greenhouse gas effect there-which
is nonsense.

Like other skeptics the three strongly believe the
Sun is our key climate driver and natural cycles dictate Earth's
ever-changing climate.

Hertzberg attributes his healthy cynicism
to three years in the U.S. Navy. Now retired at Copper Mountain,
Colorado, this erudite exponent of skepticism towards man-made global
warming has productively been engaged in raising greater public
awareness of this most contentious of scientific issues.

Now
that the VERY low temperatures of the Antarctic make large sea level
rises an impossibility under even the most extreme model projections,
Warmists have to find other bad effects of Warming. And extinctions of
various sorts are sometimes proposed as one terrible result that we
must avoid. 'And that's not to mention the 30% of species at risk of
extinction.' says one Greenie site

Julian Simon had the
measure of this particular sleight of hand 26 years ago (3). Take the
upper end of a speculative range of values, and report it as if it were a
fact. Not only that, decouple it further to suggest that the '30%'
applies to all species, and not merely to a subset deemed at particular
risk.

The ‘30%’ figure was promoted in the IPCC's 2007 Summary
Report for Policy Makers, where it was the upper end of a range. For a
summary of some of their scare stories from 2007, see (4), which has
this:

'The report says that around 20 per cent to 30 per cent of
the plant and animal species assessed are likely to be at increased risk
of extinction if global average temperatures exceed 1.5 degree C to 2.5
degree C over late 20th century levels.'

So not only is this a
speculation about the impact on a subset of species, it presumes a
further speculation about temperatures. Both speculations are so flimsy
that the whole phrase is worthless except as a piece of propaganda
designed for the mass media.

The low levels of scientific and
statistical competence in the mass media allow such things to pass
unchallenged in the news, and of course the juxtaposition with talk of
man-made CO2 invites the public to more misleading conclusions.

First
of all, species have always died out, and one might argue pedantically
that 100% are ‘at risk of extinction’ – it is part and parcel of
evolution, and of the vulnerability of any lifeform. Why would this be
worse under warming, given that conditions would be generally more
favourable for life? Especially if ambient CO2 levels increase, since
more CO2 would provide an appreciable surge in plant growth wherever
there was no other constraint such as insufficient mineral availability.

Both
the species estimates and the temperature projections are based on
computer models. Computer models of these poorly understood and complex
systems are merely vehicles for exploring conjectures in limited ways.
In particular, they provide neither evidence nor data, merely
speculations. Apparently the species extinction models referred to by
the IPCC took no account of acclimatisation nor of the more favourable
growing environment produced by increased ambient CO2 levels.

This
is eerily reminiscent of the absurd doom-laden talk in the 1970s by the
notorious scaremongerer Paul Ehrlich, who also took no account of human
ingenuity and of the benefits of certain trends such as increased
availability of energy supplies and other resources. His mental model
of the world seems to view it as some kind of petri-dish, lacking in
intelligent life.

As for the models used to support the 2007 assertions on extinctions, here is a recent expert opinion on them:

'The
two researchers - Kathy Willis from the UK's Long-Term Ecology
Laboratory of Oxford University's Centre for the Environment, and Shonil
Bhagwat from Norway's University of Bergen - raise a warning flag about
the older models, stating "their coarse spatial scales fail to capture
topography or 'microclimatic buffering' and they often do not consider
the full acclimation capacity of plants and animals," citing the
analysis of Botkin et al. (2007) in this regard.'

This article concludes:

‘Clearly,
the panic-evoking extinction-predicting paradigms of the past are
rapidly giving way to the realization they bear little resemblance to
reality. Earth's plant and animal species are not slip-sliding away -
even slowly - into the netherworld of extinction that is preached from
the pulpit of climate alarmism as being caused by CO2-induced global
warming.’

The CO2 Science site (6) has a lot more useful stuff on species extinctions, as does the SPPI site (7).

The
casual throwing around of scary but phoney numbers, and their
replication through mass media in support of their cause, is all part of
the modus operandi of the IPCC. Their touting of the '40%' fantasy
fact about the Amazon being but one of many, and one which by itself
could account for a great many species extinctions. Here it is refuted
(8):

'The IPCC is under scrutiny for various data inaccuracies,
including its claim -- based on a flawed World Wildlife Fund study --
that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically and be
replaced by savannas from even a slight reduction in rainfall. "Our
results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions
in rainfall," said Sangram Ganguly, an author on the new study, from
the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute affiliated with NASA Ames
Research Center in California."The way that the WWF report
calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are
by far more reliable and correct," said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian
National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of
the IPCC.'

So, what are we to make of the '30%'? My inclination
is to read it bearing in mind the above reservations about models, and
taking due note of this statement (9):

'The attitude toward
scientific fact reporting by environmental scientists may be best
summarized by Stanford biology professor, Stephen Schneider’s statement,
“We need to get loads of media coverage, so we have to offer up scary
scenarios and make dramatic statements. Each of us has to decide on the
right balance between effectiveness and honesty”.'

Along with
some examples where honesty seemed to count for very little: 'In ten
years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas
of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead
fish.'

—Paul Ehrlich, (Earth Day 1970) (10)

'Dr. S. Dillon
Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25
years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living
animals will be extinct.'• Sen. Gaylord Nelson (Earth Day 1970) (11)

And
perhaps, if you think the '30%' still has a shred of credibility,
consider this 'data' pushed by the WWF in 1996, and roundly rebutted
here (12):

'How does WWF arrive at the number 5O,OOO species
extinctions per year? It can be no coincidence that this same number is
the upper limit suggested by Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University.
Wilson states that while only l.5 million species have been described,
it is reasonable to believe that there are over 3O times that many, i.e.
5O million. Then a computer model, based on island biogeography theory,
is used to generate the number 5O,OOO. There is no list of Latin names
for these species. It is, in fact, a preposterous combination of
extrapolation and pulling numbers from the air.'

This is all part
of a long and ignoble tradition amongst political campaigners who wrap
themselves in the sheep's clothing of concern for the environment (13):

'In
the 45 years since the publication of Silent Spring, it is very obvious
that many environmental scientists choose effectiveness in generating
media attention over honesty. Today the ability to obtain government
funding for environmental studies clouds their judgment even more.'

I
referred to Julian Simon at the start of this post, and I expect to do
so again in this series. But for now, I'll conclude with the title of
his 1984 article (3), followed by an extract from it:

'Truth Almost Extinct in Tales of Imperiled Species.'

'...
this pure conjecture about upper limit of present species extinction
is increased and used by Mr. Myers and WWF scientist Thomas Lovejoy as
the basis for the "projections" quoted in the fundraising letter and
elsewhere. Mr. Lovejoy--by converting what was an estimated upper
limit into a present best-estimate--says that government inaction is
"likely to lead" to the extinction of between 14 and 20 percent of all
species before the year 2000. This comes to about 40,000 species lost
per year, or about one million from 1980 to 2000. In brief, this
extinction rate is nothing but pure guesswork. The forecast is a
thousand times greater than the present--yet it has been published in
newspapers and understood as a scientific statement.'

Simon
spotted their tricks back then. His insight was not enough to stop them
at their game, neither back then nor now. We are faced with campaigners
less concerned about the truth, than about the impact of their
statements in the media, and upon their sources of funding.

We
hear over and over that climate change is now so rapid that ecosystems
all over the world are in peril as they attempt to cope with changes to
the environment. This view of “delicate” ecosystems is at odds with the
reality of the long climate history of the Earth. The climate has warmed
in the past, cooled in the past, and many of these changes were quite
rapid. Delicate ecosystems would have disappeared long ago and the most
robust systems would have survived.

Birds are particular
well-suited to move as conditions change. Somewhere deep in their DNA is
a memory of changes in the past and how to cope with those changes.
Four articles have appeared recently reminding us that birds are fully
capable of responding to change in climate.

Europeans have been
observing bird behavior for centuries, and in the Volga-Kama region of
the Tatarstan Republic of Russia, observations go back to 1811 AD. The
Tatarstan skylarks migrate south for the winter and their return is a
traditional harbinger of spring in Northern, Central, and Eastern
Europe. A team of scientists from Tatarstan Republic and the United
Kingdom examined the long record of return dates of the skylark and
noticed that they have been arriving earlier and earlier over the past
three decades (11 days earlier since the late 1970s). Askeyev et al.
showed that the trend in bird behavior occurred when the March air
temperatures in the region have increased by 3.7ºC. The climate changes,
the birds respond. C’est la vie. We note that the birds don’t appear to
be victims of changes in temperature – they’ve appropriately adapted
their behavior to fit ever-changing conditions.

A similar story
can be found in a recent article in the Journal of Ornithology in which
attention was placed on climate change and the Great Reed Warbler in
Poland. Dyrcz and Halupka collected breeding data on the birds over a
study period extending from 1970 to 2007; the birds were studied near
fish ponds in southwestern Poland that are part of the “Stawy Milickie”
nature reserve. They noted that over the study period, the May to July
(the months of egg laying) temperatures in the area had increased by
2.2ºC. As the temperatures warmed, the birds moved up egg laying by
nearly two weeks. They note that “We did not detect any effect of
ambient temperature on clutch size, length of laying period, nest losses
and production of fledglings per nest.” They conclude “In summary, it
seems that so far the Great Reed Warbler has adapted well to climate
change by shifting the timing of breeding, but not changing other
parameters of breeding biology. The studied population does not benefit
from climate warming (as was found in Bavaria), but apparently does not
suffer. Hence, the results of this study do not confirm the
prediction…that long-distance migrants would suffer due to climate
change.”

A similar study was carried out in eastern Poland
dealing with four different varieties of sedentary birds, which because
they do not migrate, they might be more vulnerable to changes in
climate. Weso?owski and Cholewa studied the birds within Poland’s
Bialowieza National Park (BNP) which provides nearly pristine conditions
in terms of little anthropogenic alterations. They collected data on
the various birds over the period 1975 to 2007, and they indeed found a
significant warming during the spring of over 1ºC. The authors caution
that “However, it must be stressed that the climate in the Bialowieza
region seems to be fluctuating without a clear warming trend when
investigated over a longer time period. Two warmer than average periods
were discernible within a 215 year series (1780–1995), namely years
1820–1870 and the current time period from 1970 onwards.” They too found
that the birds breed earlier as spring temperatures warm, and they
state “As all the bird species studied in BNP were phonologically
plastic and strongly responded to rising spring temperatures by breeding
earlier, they were behaviourally and physiologically equipped to adjust
phenotypically and are probably able to adjust to much stronger climate
warming than observed at present.” Once again, the birds are found to
be well-equipped to handle changes in climate.

A fourth recent
study on birds and climate changed was conducted by three scientists
from New York and their results appeared in Global Change Biology.
Zuckerberg et al. state that “We used the New York State Breeding Bird
Atlas, a statewide survey of 5332 25 km2 blocks surveyed in 1980–1985
and 2000–2005, to test several predictions that the birds of New York
State are responding to climate change.” They noted that the New York
area warmed over 1ºC between the two survey periods and accordingly,
they predicted that the birds would have moved poleward and to higher
elevations. The three scientists report “As expected, we found all bird
species (n = 129) included in this analysis showed an average northward
range shift in their mean latitude of 3.58 km.” However, they found
“Counter to our predictions, and the results from other studies and
models, we did not find a general pattern of species moving to higher
elevations.”

All of these studies remind us that the birds have
been around a very long time, they have experience massive changes in
climate over the eons of their existence, they have learned how to adapt
to warmer and colder conditions - they are not going to sit idly by and
become victims of the global warming.

Another brain-dead Greenie idea from
Australia's Leftist government. Now it seems that they aim to ban big
fridges and other appliances

Got a big family and need a
big fridge? No problems! Just buy two small ones. It will hit your
pocket and will do nothing for the environment but it will keep the
Green/Left happy!

JULIA Gillard will try to put her
tarnished asylum seeker plan behind her by nailing down her final
election plank - a new climate change policy. Ms Gillard, who failed to
get the backing of East Timor's Parliament to build an asylum seeker
detention centre in the impoverished country, will take her climate plan
to Cabinet within days.

Key measures are being finalised,
including plans for a national "energy savings initiative". The
mandatory scheme will replace a patchwork of existing state-based
schemes by about 2012. However, the policy could be bad news for the
family hip pockets, with tighter restrictions expected on energy-sapping
appliances such as clothes dryers and refrigerators, The Daily
Telegraph reported.

Australia allows a number of appliances that are banned from the more greenhouse-conscious places such as Europe and Japan.

Power
companies will go to the homes of customers to give energy efficiency
advice, with Ms Gillard pledging to reduce "our carbon footprint as a
country" by starting with co-operation between households and energy
companies.

The plan is designed to provide a so-called
"step-change" in national energy usage as a key aspect of the
Government's international commitment to greenhouse gas reductions,
which was signed at Copenhagen. Corporations are also likely to receive
financial support to "retro-fit" old buildings with state-of-the-art
technology.

Ms Gillard will want to refresh Labor's stance on the
environment, especially in light of three damning reports into the
Government's $275 million Green Loans scheme, and her predecessor, Kevin
Rudd's decision to push back an emissions trading scheme to at least
2012.

Norm
Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca] points out the problems that more global
cooling will bring -- with starvation looming for the poorest

The
next IPCC Report will be the first report that actually has scientific
justification for being "alarmist" because by 2014 we will be well into
solar cycle 24 and severe global cooling. This will confirm that the
global cooling which started in 2002 is related to solar activity and
the likelihood that the current solar activity pattern is mimicking the
Dalton Minimum that brought about an extension of the Little Ice Age.

The
first IPCC Report in 1990 depicted a temperature reconstruction showing
the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. While there is well
over half a degree C left to go before the world actually reaches the
pleasant temperature of the Medieval Warm Period, this will not be
reached for several decades because, in spite of continuously increasing
CO2 emissions, the world is cooling in response to solar cycles, and we
are very likely headed for at least two decades of rather unpleasant
cool temperatures.

Close inspection of the graph in the 1990 IPCC
Report shows the Little Ice Age corresponding exactly to the Maunder
Minimum, and the recovery from the depths of the Little Ice Age is
terminated by the return to cold temperatures consistent with the Dalton
Minimum.

The justifiable alarmism in the 2014 IPCC Report will
not be about sea level rise. This is because the rate of sea level rise
has actually decreased over the past decade, negating any possible
claims of increased sea level rise related to the 29.3% increase in
global CO2 emissions in the past ten years.

The justifiable
alarmism will be about shortages in both global food supplies and global
energy supply. The food supply will be reduced because of the shortened
growing seasons in the "temperate food supplying regions" of the world
resulting from this global cooling. This reduction in food supply will
only exacerbate the current global food crisis caused by Kyoto "carbon
credit initiatives" that have turned "food crops" into "biofuel crops"
with the resultant widespread starvation of the poorest people in the
poorest nations.

The potential energy shortages will result from
the increased energy demand dictated by the cooler temperatures. This
shortage will be far more severe than it should be because of the
costly, inefficient, and limited solar and wind power initiatives and
the virtual stagnation in expansion of efficient and high volume energy
producing facilities for the past decade that have resulted from The
Kyoto Protocol initiatives and exorbitant "Carbon Capture and
Sequestration" (CCS) requirements that have made expansion of fossil
fuel power production facilities economically unfeasible.

The
global data demonstrates that there was only 23 years, from 1975 to
1998, during which there was actual global warming concurrent with rapid
increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Prior to that, the world
cooled from 1942 to 1795 with increasing CO2 emissions that went from
4gt/year in 1942 to over 20gt/year by 1975. During the rapid global
warming that preceded this cooling period, there was only a minor
increase from 3.5gt/year at the start of the warming in 1910, to
4gt/year by 1942 when the warming ended.

By the time of the next
report in 2014, CO2 emissions will have increased by at least another
2gt/year but not producing any global warming for 16 years (and over a
decade of actual global cooling in spite of increasing CO2 emissions).

If
the IPCC claims any possible link between CO2 emissions and global
warming in this 2014 Report; it will be a clear indication that this
agency is completely devoid of any integrity; neither scientific nor
moral.

Received by email

The Muir Russell whitewash of "Climategate"

The "old boy network" defends its own

The
University of East Anglia's enquiry into the conduct of its own staff
at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the
department and staff conduct - but clears the path for the individuals
concerned to carry on.

The CRU played an important role in
writing the UN's IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far
from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir
Muir Russell even calls for "a concerted and sustained campaign to win
hearts and minds" to restore confidence in the team's work.

Russell
was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source
code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source
code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were
of the academics' own making, stating that they were "united in defence
against criticism". Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising
to "redefine" the peer review publication process, and put pressure on
journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process,
and their "rigour" and "honesty" were beyond question.

Leading
academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell
enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events.
The subjects of their criticism were not invited, not were climate
scientists critical of their behaviour. For example, in their capacity
as IPCC gatekeepers, the academics are cleared of excluding critical
evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies.

To
reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a
criterion: a "consistence of view" with earlier work. The earlier work
here was in fact produced the academics under scrutiny. So, having
compared the CRU academics' work against their previous work, and found
it to be consistent, they are cleared of malpractice [!!]

Despite
the gentlemanly and clubbable tone, the report nevertheless has deep
systemic criticism of the institution and the team's processes. UEA
"fell badly short of its scientific and public obligations", according
to one review panel member, Lancet editor Richard Horton.

It
criticises the team's decision to curtail a temperature reconstruction
at 1960, and splice on an instrumental temperature record, without
explanation, noting: "The figure supplied for the WMO Report was
misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post
1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and
instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is
misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice
data."

There's a selective approach to criticism of scientific
techniques - officially, Muir Russell says it doesn't examine the
validity of scientific arguments. But as you can see, in places, it
does. On the issue of the Yamal reconstruction, CRU is cleared but the
related issues of basing the reconstruction on a limited sample of
proxies, and using techniques which exaggerate and validate outliers
(basically, one tree) is not addressed.

On compliance with
Freedom of Information requests, the inquiry found the CRU team evasive,
and "found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial
answer". They also found "a clear incitement to delete e-mails,
although we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information
in respect of a request already made". (Jones had told a US academic
that "I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and
requesting deletions from other staff.)

The defensiveness "set
the stage", says Russell, for the barrage of FOIA requests last year,
but "clear and early action would likely have prevented much subsequent
grief". It adds that "CRU helped create the conditions for this campaign
by being unhelpful in its earlier responses".

The institution
itself had failed to anticipate the new FOIA regime, and let the
academics run amok. Strangely it calls for "a concerted and sustained
campaign to win hearts and minds" to restore confidence.

On
information handling, the report "highlighted significant problems in
the areas of: imbalance of authority; lack of effective challenge at
appeal; over dependence on single individuals; inadequate escalation
processes and limited strategic oversight."

The panel avoided
examining the scientific work of the CRU Team - as have the two other
reviews of the leaked archive by Lord Oxburgh, and the Commons Select
Committee on science. If the academics had used
bats' wings or tea leaves to create temperature reconstructions, that
wasn't a matter for any of the panels to judge. And this is
undoubtedly a shortcoming. The voter is entitled to see the evidence and
understand the arguments that may answer the question: "Is this climate
thing anything to worry about?"

Adiabatic
effects -- in this case the effect of pressure on the temperature of
gases -- have been known for centuries, but they have only recently been
remembered in explaining earth's temperature. But they explain the
temperature of Venus best of all -- unlike the quite fraudulent
"runaway greenhouse effect" that is usually invoked to explain why Venus
is superheated.

Note that even on Earth in places like like the
Dead Sea, or Death Valley, or the deep gold mines in South Africa, which
are all below sea level, temperatures are significantly higher than in
comparable regions at sea level, and that has nothing to do with the CO2
content of the atmosphere but rather due to adiabatic compression.

The
first problem is that the surface of Venus receives no direct sunshine.
The Venusian atmosphere is full of dense, high clouds “30–40 km thick
with bases at 30–35 km altitude.“ The way a greenhouse effect works is
by shortwave radiation warming the ground, and greenhouse gases impeding
the return of long wave radiation to space. Since there is very little
sunshine reaching below 30km on Venus, it does not warm the surface
much. This is further evidenced by the fact that there is almost no
difference in temperature on Venus between day and night. It is just as
hot during their very long (1400 hours) nights, so the 485C
temperatures can not be due to solar heating and a resultant greenhouse
effect. The days on Venus are dim and the nights are pitch black.

The
next problem is that the albedo of Venus is very high, due to the 100%
cloud cover. At least 65% of the sunshine received by Venus is
immediately reflected back into space. Even the upper atmosphere
doesn’t receive a lot of sunshine. The top of Venus’ atmosphere receives
1.9 times as much solar radiation as earth, but the albedo is more than
double earth’s – so the net effect is that Venus’ upper atmosphere
receives a lower TSI than earth.

The third problem is that Venus
has almost no water vapor in the atmosphere. The concentration of water
vapor is about one thousand times greater on earth.

Water vapor is a much more important greenhouse gas than CO2, because it absorbs a wider spectrum of infrared light

The
effects of increasing CO2 decay logarithmically. Each doubling of CO2
increases temperatures by 2-3C. So if earth went from .04% CO2 to 100%
CO2, it would raise temperatures by less than 25-36C.

Even
worse, if earth’s atmosphere had almost no water (like Venus)
temperatures would be much colder – like the Arctic. The excess CO2
does not begin to compensate for the lack of H2O. Water vapour accounts
for 70-95% of the greenhouse effect on earth. The whole basis of the
CAGW argument is that H2O feedback will overwhelm the system, yet Venus
has essentially no H2O to feed back. CAGW proponents are talking out of
both sides of their mouth.

So why is Venus hot? Because it has
an extremely high atmospheric pressure. The atmospheric pressure on
Venus is 92X greater than earth. Temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere
warm over 80C going from 20 kPa (altitude 15km) to 100 kPa (sea level.)
That is why mountains are much colder than the deserts which lie at
their base.

The atmospheric pressure on Venus is greater than
9,000 kPa. At those pressures, we would expect Venus to be very hot.
Much, much hotter than Death Valley.

This is very close to what
we see on Venus. The high temperatures there can be almost completely
explained by atmospheric pressure – not composition. If 90% of the CO2
in Venus atmosphere was replaced by Nitrogen, it would change
temperatures there by only a few tens of degrees.

In
the speculative discussion around the existence of an atmospheric
natural greenhouse effect or the existence of an atmospheric CO2
greenhouse effect it is sometimes stated that the greenhouse effect
could modify the temperature profile of the Earth’s atmosphere.

This
conjecture is related to another popular but incorrect idea
communicated by some proponents of the global warming hypothesis, namely
the hypothesis that the temperatures of the Venus are due to a
greenhouse effect. For instance, in their book “Der Klimawandel.
Diagnose, Prognose, Therapie” (Climate Change. Diagnosis, Prognosis,
Therapy) “two leading international experts”, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber
and Stefan Rahmstorf, present a “compact and understandable review” of
“climate change” to the general public.

On page 32 they
explicitly refer to the “power” of the “greenhouse effect” on the Venus.
The claim of Rahmstorf and Schellhuber is that the high venusian
surface temperatures somewhere between 400 and 500 Celsius degrees are
due to an atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effect.

Of course, they are
not. On the one hand, since the venusian atmosphere is opaque to
visible light, the central assumption of the greenhouse hypotheses is
not obeyed. On the other hand, if one compares the temperature and
pressure profiles of Venus and Earth, one immediately will see that they
are both very similar.

An important difference is the
atmospheric pressure on the ground, which is approximately two orders
higher than on the Earth. At 50 km altitude the venusian atmospheric
pressure corresponds to the normal pressure on the Earth with
temperatures at approximately 37 Celsius degrees. [i.e. a temperature fairly common in tropical regions on earth --JR]

Scientists as propagandists: "developing stories"

The
facts obviously don't speak for themselves. An excerpt below from the
reliably Warmist "Nature" magazine. I always thought that research was
what scientists did, not "developing stories". I guess that shows what
an old fogey I am

At Climate Central, a non-profit
organization based in Princeton, New Jersey, scientists work with
journalists and writers to develop climate stories in partnership with
media outlets. The idea came together in 2008, backed by high-profile
scientists such as Jane Lubchenco, who oversees much of the nation's
climate science as head the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Climate Central has published work in major magazines
and newspapers as well as on broadcast television; one story in Time
magazine (see http://go.nature.com/BgyVSP) covered a Nature paper
documenting increasing ocean temperatures (J. M. Lyman et al. Nature
465, 334-337; 2009).

Researchers at George Mason University have
teamed up with Climate Central on a project to see whether
meteorologists on television can change the way people think about
climate issues by making global warming into a local phenomenon.
Beginning this summer on the television network WLTX in Columbia, South
Carolina, weather forecaster Jim Gandy will integrate global warming
into his coverage. Topics might include projections for increasing
weather extremes over the next century, and how local gardeners are
adapting to climate change. The George Mason team will use surveys at
the start and end of the project to see whether it has any effect on
public opinion.

It is no coincidence that the team is starting
with weather forecasters: a recent poll found that, after scientists,
they are the most trusted source of information on global warming,
despite their lack of formal training in climate science. "The nation's
weather forecasters are basically standing by, ready to teach their
local populations," says Edward Maibach, director of George Mason
University's Center for Climate Change Communication. "We feel that we
know them and trust them, and that means that they actually have greater
potential to engage the public and teach them about climate change than
do climate scientists, as a profession."

Similar discussions
have unfolded in the United Kingdom. In March, the Science Media Centre
in London brought together a number of climate researchers in an effort
to expand the roster of scientists talking to the media, which has
tended to consult only a few high-profile researchers.

Sheila
Jasanoff, a science-policy expert at Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, says that more communication is good, particularly if
scientists can help people to understand the local effects of a global
phenomenon. But she warns against the assumption that public doubts and
the lack of political action on climate change reflect a problem that
can be solved simply by transferring knowledge.

As a model for
how to move forward, Jasanoff points to the US government's health and
environmental regulatory process, which seeks public input through [easily manipulated]
comments on proposed actions and includes non-scientists on advisory
boards. She says that researchers should look for ways to build trust by
taking on board the concerns of the public.

Leiserowitz agrees
that scientists should engage with the public, but he also urges
researchers to be realistic about their influence. "Even if
climate-change scientists suddenly had the abilities of Carl Sagan to
bring complex ideas to the public, there's only so much they can do,"
says Leiserowitz. "It's hubristic to think that if we could just
communicate better, suddenly we would change the world."

The
mission statement of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to
“protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment — air,
water and land — upon which life depends.”

Today the EPA does
indeed have its opinions on protecting Americans and the environment.
More recently it seems the EPA is more concerned with regulations, rules
and power than it is about safeguarding our natural resources.

President
Richard Nixon formed the EPA in 1970 with the intent that the
organization would battle pollutants and research clean and effective
ways to protect all components of the environment. President Nixon felt
having a separate agency handle these tasks independently, while still
seeking the expertise of other government organizations, would provide a
safer, more efficient America.

The EPA of today was never the intent of President Nixon.

Taking
a glance at the oil-laden Gulf of Mexico proves the point that the EPA
is more concerned about enforcing regulations than it is about cleaning
up the oil. If it cared anything about the Gulf and those states
affected by the spill, it would encourage the Administration to lift the
Jones Act and allow the world’s skimmer ships to enter and help clean
up the Gulf. President Bush lifted the Act after Hurricane Katrina.
Facing a disaster of this magnitude should warrant a similar reaction by
Obama. The State Department did finally accept 22 offers from 12
countries and international organization to help with the efforts in the
Gulf, without lifting the Act.

However, regulations still
persist as the EPA is not allowing these skimmer ships to do their job
because they don’t filter out the required 15 parts per million of
contaminants.

For not wavering on its regulations, restricting
the full potential of skimmer ships, the EPA is in no way protecting our
environment. Instead of having a mostly oil-free Gulf, we have an ocean
drenched in oil. After 77 days, the oil leak is still spewing about
250,000 barrels per day. Contrary to its initial claims of being able to
skim 491,721 barrels of oil per day, BP has only been able to skim an
average of less than 900 barrels per day.

An agency established
to protect the environment is hurting the economies of the affected
states and killing wildlife in the area, all by prolonging the necessary
cleanup from this devastating crisis.

The EPA’s stonewalling of
cleanup efforts doesn’t stop at skimmer ships. In May, the EPA gave BP
24 hours to find a different chemical dispersant than the one it had
already used on 600,000 gallons on the surface and 55,000 underwater to
help clean up the oil spill. The dispersants being used, Corexit 9500A
and Corexit 9527A, were on the EPA-approved list. As previously reported
by Americans for Limited Government (ALG), apparently, these “green”
regulators didn’t like BP using a dispersant, approved by their own
agency, and demanded they cease and desist and submit an alternative
plan.

The list could go on of ridiculous judgment calls by the
EPA. Earlier this year EPA officials met with film director James
Cameron along with scientists and other experts to discuss the oil
spill. James Cameron was invited because of his expertise on underwater
filming and remote vehicle technologies after his filming of “Titanic.”
The EPA described the meeting as “part of the federal government’s
ongoing efforts to hear from stakeholders, scientists and experts from
academia, government and the private sector as we continue to respond to
the BP oil spill.”

Unless the EPA plans to make a movie of the
oil spill, Hollywood should not be consulted. There are many legitimate
experts who could have and should have been called upon to assist in the
handling of this disaster.

The incompetence and radical
environmentalism by the EPA continues outside the Gulf oil spill. The
EPA wants to use its endangerment findings, obtained earlier this year,
to regulate carbon dioxide — its own version of cap-and-trade. This is a
complete breach of power by the EPA according to the language in the
Clean Air Act.

As reported by the American Spectator, the EPA
changed the way the Clean Air Act applies to carbon dioxide. “The plain
language of the Clean Air Act would apply the regulations to anyone who
emits more than 250 tons of CO2 in a year. That means fast food
franchises, apartment buildings, and hospitals would be subject to
regulations aimed at clamping down on pollution from large industrial
facilities. Even the EPA recognized the absurdity of this result. It
took it upon itself to rewrite the law, saying that what the Clean Air
Act meant in this case was 25,000 tons, not 250, and issued what it
called a ‘tailoring rule’ to this effect. This represents a significant
assault on the principle of separation of powers.”

ALG President
Bill Wilson couldn’t agree more. “This is not necessarily an
environmental, energy or even a tax issue — it’s a constitutional
separation of powers issue,” he says. “Even if a senator believes in the
highly controversial dogma that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases are harmful, he or she should be gravely concerned at the blatant
power grab the EPA has engaged in to declare that those gases are
covered under the Clean Air Act.”

With the Senate voting 53 to
47, approving of the EPA’s findings, the agency will continue to work
with the Administration to build the framework for cap-and-trade
regulation, which will surely implement new and harmful taxes on
American businesses.

While the EPA continues to feed its
insatiable appetite for power and new regulations, it is killing
American jobs in the process. From its neglect in the cleanup efforts of
the oil spill devastating the fishing industry in New Orleans, to its
fight for a six-month moratorium to be placed on drilling in the Gulf,
people are now without jobs and can no longer provide for their
families.

Don’t be fooled by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s
comments this past Earth Day when she stated, “Despite the overheated
rhetoric we often hear today about runaway environmental regulations
killing jobs, our history is one of healthier families, cleaner
communities — and, yes, job-creating innovation and a stronger America.”

Based on EPA’s actions and inactions of recent time, Jackson is certainly not talking about the America of today.

This
is a blatant plug for a wonderfully frank book by Robert Bryce, “Power
Hungry: The myths of ‘green’ energy and the real fuels of the future.”
It won’t be well-received by greenies and global warmists. Bryce,
incidentally, has 3,200 watts of solar photovoltaic panels on his
house’s roof, though after breakdowns, monthly roof-top mopping to keep
them clean and substantial cost (despite subsidies) to put them there,
he wonders aloud “if they were really worth it.”

That aside,
Bryce sums up his energy policy as simply (and a lot like everyone
else’s on earth when you scrape away the faux ideology): “I’m in favor
of air conditioning and cold beer.”

Here are a few of the inconvenient truths Bryce reports:

“American voters have been bombarded with nonsense about energy, and much of that nonsense has been embraced.”

“We
use hydrocarbons – coal, oil and natural gas – not because we like
them, but because they produce lots of heat energy from small spaces at
prices we can afford, and in the quantities that we demand. And that’s
the absolutely critical point.”

“…the United States has built a
$14-trillion-per-year economy that’s based almost entirely on cheap
hydrocarbons. No matter how much the United States and the rest of the
world may desire a move away from those fossil fuels, the transition to
renewable sources of energy – and to no-carbon sources such as nuclear
power – will take most of the twent first century and require trillions
of dollars in new investment.”

Bryce spends a good bit of the book refuting the claims and assumptions about green technologies that “simply won’t work.”

“These
claims ignore the hard realities… It may be fashionable to promote
wind, solar and biofuels, but those sources fail when it comes to power
density. We want energy sources that produce lots of power … from small
amounts of real estate. And that’s the key problem with wind, solar and
biofuels: They require huge amounts of land to generate meaningful
amounts of power.”

Bryce points to futile and even
counterproductive efforts like congressional mandates for motorists to
buy ethanol-based gasoline, supposedly to reduce dependence on foreign
oil.

“Instead, these measures only worsened air quality,
increased food costs, damaged untold numbers of engines and slashed the
amount of grain available in the global marketplace.”

We
recommend you break through the media “happy talk,” as Bryce describes
it, and the ideologically green Utopian thinking and pick up a copy of
“Power Hungry…” Until you’re persuaded he’s right, you can read it by
candlelight. But by Chapter 1, you’ll have flipped the light switch on
and maybe settled into air-conditioned comfort with a cold beer.

The fact that low solar
activity has long been associated with colder weather in both Europe and
the USA is finally getting a grudging admission from Warmists. But, as
with their "explanation" of the Medieval warm period as being "local",
they are now saying that solar effects are local too!

It's hard
to believe but the paper below actually argues that a quiet sun makes
it particularly cold in England only! Though some "leakage" to nearby
Europe is apparently allowed. The fact that unusually cold weather in
England is closely correlated with unusually cold weather across the
entire Eurasian continent is blithely ignored.

Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to
levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum
(about 1650–1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which
coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental
Europe. Motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK, we
investigate the possible connection with solar activity. We identify
regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England
temperature (CET) record using reconstructions of the northern
hemisphere mean temperature. We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity,
consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent
blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a
regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a
global effect. Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985
and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder
minimum conditions within the next 50 years (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc.
A 466 303–29): the results presented here indicate that, despite
hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold
winters than during recent decades.

Creating
green jobs is all the rage. About a year ago Kevin Rudd promised to
create 50,000 of them. Tony Abbott has plans for a standing army of
15,000 green workers who could be deployed across the country. And every
environmental group or renewable energy lobby group wants to tell us
how many "green-collar jobs" could be generated if only we'd do as they
say.

It seems the notion of green jobs arose as a response to the
claims of the opponents of climate policy that moving to a low-carbon
economy would destroy lots of jobs. No it wouldn't, environmentalists
cried, it would create lots of jobs. What's more, they would be green
jobs.

But as the Australia Institute warns in a policy brief to
be released today, there's a lot of woolly thinking about green jobs. It
seems to be little more than a propaganda tool.

For a start,
there has been little attempt to define what constitutes a green job.
If, for instance, a job maintaining a wind turbine is a green job, what
about a job in the business that makes the turbines?

And if it's
green to manufacture steel turbines, what about the jobs of the people
who mine the iron ore and coking coal needed to make the steel? But if
it's not green to be a miner, would it be better for us to import all
the turbines we need so the sin of being non-green was on someone else's
head?

Should people who work in industries with a low
environmental impact be regarded as having green jobs? If so, a
significant proportion of all our existing jobs - particularly those in
health, education and community services - are green.

But what
about jobs in industries that have reduced their ecological footprint,
even though it remains substantial? Are these jobs more green or less
green than jobs in industries whose footprint has always been small?

As
a general rule, industries that are capital-intensive are likely to
have a bigger footprint than industries that are labour-intensive, such
as service industries. Does this mean we could make the economy greener
by abandoning our age-old quest to use machines to replace workers
wherever possible?

Do workers whose job is to return a mine site
to nature after it has been worked out qualify as green-collar workers?
If so, what about workers who clean up after oil spills?

And what
about jobs that make the natural environment more accessible to people?
If, for instance, you employ some young people to improve the signs on a
bush-walking track (for which I'm always grateful) are these green
jobs? The advocates of such projects seem to think so.

Visiting
the great outdoors may make people more environmentally conscious. But
what if the greater accessibility attracts more people and thus adds to
the degradation of the area? Would the green jobs then turn brown?

If
I were to drive all around the state - or fly all around the world -
educating people about the damage the use of fossil fuels does to the
climate, would that make me a green-collar worker?

Give up? I
reckon it's virtually impossible to come up with a watertight definition
of green jobs. But I don't think that matters. As the Australia
Institute's report argues, focusing on green jobs is at best a
distraction and at worse a snare and a delusion. The object of the
climate change exercise is to move to an economy where little of our
energy needs are met by burning fossil fuels, thereby making us a
"low-carbon economy" and greatly reducing our emissions of greenhouse
gases.

Focus on that and the jobs will look after themselves.
What seems to be missing from the preoccupation with green jobs is an
understanding that all economic activity creates jobs. Moving to a
low-carbon economy may well involve reducing jobs in industries that
produce fossil fuels, but it will also create them in renewable-energy
industries. And even should producing a quantity of energy from solar,
wind or whatever involve fewer jobs than producing the same quantity
from coal, that's not a problem either. This greater productivity of
labour would leave income to be spent elsewhere in the economy -
probably the services sector - where it would create jobs.

Our
businesses have been using "labour-saving equipment" to replace workers
for 200 years and it hasn't cause mass unemployment yet. (It's true,
however, that the workers displaced from fossil-fuel industries may not
be well placed to take the jobs created in the renewable industries or
elsewhere, but that problem - which does need to be dealt with - is
common to all the changes in the structure of the economy that
continuous technological advance has caused over the centuries.)

It's
OK for governments to spend money for the dominant purpose of creating
jobs when they're fighting to urgently reduce the impact of recession.
Apart from that, however, the money they spend should be aimed at
achieving its nominal purpose. The number of jobs this spending creates
should be incidental.

If we continue our muddled thinking about
green jobs, we risk having politicians trying to curry our favour by
wasting money on schemes that will do little to combat climate change.

The
United Nations body that advises governments on climate change failed
to make clear how its landmark report on the impact of global warming
often presented a worst-case scenario, an investigation has concluded.

A
summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
on regional impacts focused on the negative consequences of climate
change and failed to make clear that there would also be some benefits
of rising temperatures. The report adopted a “one-sided” approach that
risked being interpreted as an “alarmist view”.

The report, which
underpinned the Copenhagen summit last December, wrongly suggested that
climate change was the main reason why communities faced severe water
shortages and neglected to make clear that population growth was a much
bigger factor.

The inquiry into the IPCC was ordered by the Dutch
Government after the UN body admitted that its 2007 report contained
two important errors.

It is the first of two studies this week
into the veracity of climate science. The second, focusing on e-mails
stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, will
be published tomorrow.

That study, led by Sir Muir Russell, is
expected to dismiss claims that the unit’s scientists manipulated their
findings but may say that they should have been more willing to share
their raw data.

The IPCC’s report, used by governments around the
world to develop emissions policies, falsely claimed that Himalayan
glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe that they
will take at least 300 years to melt.

The report also said that more than half the Netherlands was below sea level (the correct figure is 26 per cent).

The
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which published the
results of its investigation yesterday, concluded that the IPCC’s main
findings were justified and that climate change did indeed pose
substantial risks to most parts of the world. But it said that the IPCC
could strengthen its credibility by describing the full range of
possible outcomes, rather than picking on the most alarming projections.

Obama Administration Prepares Legal Challenge to batty British taxes on air travel

The
coalition government's plan to reform aviation taxes in order to better
encourage airlines to cut carbon emissions could face a legal challenge
after it emerged the US government has already begun lobbying against
the move.

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that the US embassy
in London has privately called on the coalition to water down its green
tax plans over fears that it will increase the financial burden on
transatlantic operators.

An unnamed minister told the paper that
the government was sticking by its plans to replace the current Air
Passenger Duty with a per plane levy that would encourage airlines to
operate fuller aircraft.

"The US embassy has made representations
siding with the airlines," the minister said. "But the Americans will
not deter us from doing the right thing both for taxpayers and the
environment."

The proposed reforms were included in both the
Conservative and the Lib Dem’s election manifestos and are a key
component of the coalitions programme for government. The changes are
expected to be confirmed by the Treasury in the autumn and could come
into effect as early as next year.

However, with ministers having
signalled that they are keen to increase green taxes airlines are
concerned that the changes could provide the cover for an increase in
the tax burden imposed on the industry and US airlines are already
considering legal action against the changes.

The US aviation
industry is already in the throes of a legal challenge against the EU's
move to extend its emissions trading scheme to cover flights to and from
the EU. A coalition of US airlines have launched a legal action in the
UK arguing that the EU does not have the jurisdiction to apply charges
to flights to and from the US and that the move breaches the 1944
Chicago Convention covering international aviation.

The industry
would be likely to use a similar argument to challenge any UK proposal
that would increase levies for transatlantic flights.

A
spokeswoman for the Treasury told BusinessGreen.com that the final
decision on the new tax would be made by Chancellor George Osborne,
although she added that the coalition agreement "sets out very clearly
the government position on new plane duty".

The US embassy told
the Sunday Times that it would not comment on reports it has been
lobbying against the per plane levy, but admitted it was concerned about
the proposed tax reforms.

An Editorial from "The Scotsman", once a regular Warmist organ (despite their rewrite of their history below)

ONCE
it was an inconvenient truth, one which just about everyone accepted.
Now it seems scepticism is creeping in over the issue of the moment: the
supposedly indisputable scientific evidence of climate change.

As
we reveal today, nearly a third of Scots have changed their minds on
the subject, citing the recent very cold winter and the controversies
over the validity of climate change science.

The poll tells us
what ordinary people, not the scientific or political elite, think of
the issue and shows that the evidence of their own experience, and the
debate over whether climate change research is entirely sound, has had
an impact.

As this newspaper has often argued, there are doubts
over climate change, particularly over whether the temperature rises are
significant over a long period of time.

Duncan McLaren, chief
executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland argues a large majority of
people still recognise climate change is happening, is primarily caused
by humans mandate and want governments to act on it.

This poll
should be a warning to Mr McLaren and other "green" groups not to take
the public for granted. The public is becoming more sceptical because it
is beginning to challenge a modern-day orthordoxy. That can only be
healthy for our democracy — and for the future of the planet.

Science
has been changed forever by the so-called "climategate" saga, leading
researchers have said ahead of publication of an inquiry into the affair
– and mostly it has been changed for the better.

This Wednesday
sees the publication of the Muir Russell report into the conduct of
scientists from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit
(CRU), whose emailscaused a furore in November after they were hacked
into and published online.

Critics say the emails reveal evasion
of freedom of information law, secret deals done during the writing of
reports for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), a
cover-up of uncertainties in key researchfindings and the misuse of
scientific peer review to silence critics.

But whatever Sir Muir
Russell, the chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland,
concludes on these charges, senior climate scientists say their world
has been dramatically changed by the affair.

"The release of the
emails was a turning point, a game-changer," said Mike Hulme, professor
of climate change at the University of East Anglia. "The community has
been brought up short by the row over their science. Already there is a
new tone. Researchers are more upfront, open and explicit about their
uncertainties, for instance."

And there will be other changes,
said Hulme. The emails made him reflect how "astonishing" it was that it
had been left to individual researchers to police access to the archive
of global temperature data collected over the past 160 years. "The
primary data should have been properly curated as an archive open to
all." He believes that will now happen.

Bob Watson, a former
chair of the IPCC and now chief environment scientist for the British
government, agreed. "It is clear that the scientific community will have
to respond by being more open and transparent in allowing access to raw
data in order that their scientific findings can be checked."

In
addition, Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute
on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said: "Researchers
have to accept that it won't just be their science that is judged but
also their motives, professionalism, integrity and all those other
qualities that are considered important in public life."

Researchers
outside Britain say a row that began in Norwich now has important
implications for the wider scientific community round the world.

"Trust
has been damaged," said Hans von Storch of the KGSS Research Centre in
Geesthacht, Germany. "People now find it conceivable that scientists
cheat and manipulate, and understand that scientists need societal
supervision as any other societal institution."

The climate
scientist most associated with efforts to reconciling warring factions,
Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the idea of
IPCC scientists as "self-appointed oracles, enhanced by the Nobel Prize,
is now in tatters". The outside world now sees that "the science of
climate is more complex and uncertain than they have been led to
believe".

Some IPCC scientists are in denial on this issue, she
said, arguing that they would like to see the CRU incident as "an
irrelevant blip" and to blame their problems on "a monolithic denial
machine", but that won't wash.

Roger Pielke Jr of the University
of Colorado agreed that "the climate science community, or at least its
most visible and activist wing, appeared to want to go back to waging an
all-out war on its perceived political opponents".

He added:
"Such a strategy will simply exacerbate the pathological politicisation
of the climate science community." In reality, he said, "There is no
going back to the pre-November 2009 era."

Curry exempted from
this criticism Phil Jones, CRU director and the man at the centre of the
furore. Put through the fire, "Jones seems genuinely repentant, and has
been completely open and honest about what has been done and why...
speaking with humility about the uncertainty in the data sets," she
said.

The affair "has pointed out the seamy side of peer review
and consensus building in the IPCC assessment reports," she said. "A
host of issues need to be addressed."

The veteran Oxford science
philosopher Jerome Ravetz says the role of the blogosphere in revealing
the important issues buried in the emails means it will assume an
increasing role in scientific discourse. "The radical implications of
the blogosphere need to be better understood." Curry too applauds the
rise of the "citizen scientist" triggered by climategate, and urges
scientists to embrace them.

But greater openness and engagement
with their critics will not ensure that climate scientists have an
easier time in future, warns Hulme. Back in the
lab, a new generation of more sophisticated computer models is failing
to reduce the uncertainties in predicting future climate, he says –
rather, the reverse. "This is not what the public and politicians expect, so handling and explaining this will be difficult."

Comparing
climate skeptics to Nazis was for a long time the stock in trade of the
Warmists and almost any conservative blogger can testify to the abusive
emails and comments we get but when the Warmists get some of that back
they get hysterical.

But they still haven't learned. They are
still throwing around wild accusations about their critics. Hate just
comes naturally to them and they can't suppress it

Climate
scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in
the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them
fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a
handgun.

The scientists say the threats have increased since the
furore over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia began last
November, and a sample of the hate mail sent in recent months and seen
by the Guardian reveals the scale and vitriolic tone of the abuse.

The
scientists revealed they have been told to "go gargle razor blades" and
have been described as "Nazi climate murderers". Some emails have been
sent to them without any attempt by the sender to disguise their
identity. Even though the scientists have received advice from the FBI,
the local police say they are not able to act due to the near-total
tolerance of "freedom of speech" in the US.

The problem appears
less severe in the UK but, Professor Phil Jones, the UEA scientist at
the centre of the hacked email controversy, revealed in February he had
been receiving two death threats a week and had contemplated suicide.
"People said I should go and kill myself," he said. "They said that they
knew where I lived. They were coming from all over the world." The
third and final independent review into the issues raised by the hacked
UEA emails is due to be published on Wednesday when Sir Muir Russell
presents his panel's conclusions.

Professor Stephen Schneider, a
climatologist based at Stanford University in California, whose name
features in the UEA emails, says he has received "hundreds" of violently
abusive emails since last November. The peak came in December during
the Copenhagen climate change summit, he said, but the number has picked
up again in recent days since he co-authored a scientific paper last
month which showed that 97%-98% of climate scientists agree that
mankind's carbon emissions are causing global temperatures to
increase....

[Schneider's email is
shswebsite@lists.stanford.edu. Ask him which of his climate models has
shown any predictive skill and see if that qualifies as "violently
abusive"]

"The effect on me has been tremendous," said
Schneider. "Some of these people are mentally imbalanced. They are
invariably gun-toting rightwingers [How does he know?].
What do I do? Learn to shoot a Magnum? Wear a bullet-proof jacket? I
have now had extra alarms fitted at my home and my address is unlisted. I
get scared that we're now in a new Weimar republic where people are
prepared to listen to what amounts to Hitlerian lies about climate
scientists." ...

Last month, Mann told ABC News in the US that
the following message was typical of the emails he has been receiving:
"Six feet under with the roots is where you should be. I was hoping I
would see the news that you'd committed suicide. Do it, freak." Another
climate scientist, who wished to remain anonymous, said he had had a
dead animal dumped on his doorstep and now travels with bodyguards.

UK-based
climatologists working outside of UEA report they have received far
fewer abusive emails compared to their US counterparts. Dr Myles Allen,
head of the climate dynamics group at University of Oxford's
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, said he only
tends to get such emails when he writes an article in the press and that
they "tend to start off 'Dear Communists, know that you will fail.'"

"I
suspect part of the reason people feel they have to attack climate
scientists is that politicians and environmentalists have a tendency to
hide behind the science," he said. "In the run-up to Copenhagen, we
often heard the phrase 'the science dictates' - that we need a 40% cut
in rich-country emissions by 2020, for example - when in fact only a
very specific, and politically loaded, interpretation of the science
implied any such thing. If people who claim to be
on the side of the science use scientists as human shields, it is hardly
surprising that the scientists end up getting shot at."

Dr
Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met
Office's Hadley Centre, said he had had "mercifully few" abusive emails
or letters compared to scientists in the US. "I do get letters and
emails accusing me of being wrong and stupid, but I have received few
really abusive ones. I got one accusing me of being a communist, but so
far at the Met Office at least we haven't been on the receiving end of
the types of hate mail the US scientists have apparently been getting.
Also in Australia, I hear."

There
have been several recent articles that question the basic physics
behind greenhouse theory. The report below is another one. Previously
mentioned here on 17th June

The focus of this Report

This
study only deals with one basic fact: Does an increase of CO2
concentration raise the earth’s temperatures – or not? This is simply a
question of physics and not of political or environmental beliefs. If
there was not such an influence, then

* all climate-model calculations would be wrong,

* the consequences predicted would consequently be false,

* and all costly “rescue plans” would be completely unnecessary.

The “Green Tower of Climate Dogma”

Many
people are terrified of the alarmist climate scenarios portrayed by
media, environmentalist groups, and politicians. Disappearing islands
and terrible storms are some of the inevitable consequences of the
warming, which is predicted by computer models. This study concentrates
upon the scientific basis of this dogma: the supposed CO2 warming
mechanism. If this premise can be scientifically disproven, all of the
claimed consequences were unfounded and the whole “global warming
edifice” collapses like a house of cards.

It is this critical
point upon which this report will focus. This approach differs from most
other critiques of the greenhouse dogma and purposely sets aside
peripheral issues that distract from the core issue noted above:

*
We do not look at historical temperature time series. Whether it was
warmer or colder than today 2, 20, 200 or 2000 years ago, is not
relevant to the physical effects of CO2.

* The same is true
for CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Are CO2 levels actually higher today
than in the past? Contrary to the popular belief, hundreds of old and
new studies show that CO2 levels have been higher than the present in
the recent and distant past20). If, however, CO2 did not affect global
temperature, the atmospheric levels would not be of importance21).

*
Does the sun control the temperatures on earth? There is evidence that
it does, but we will not examine this question any further. This paper
is only about the fact that CO2 does not control global temperature.

*
Is “climate” predictable – with computers? Many experts disagree.
However, in this study, it is not of interest, whether climate computer
models can be improved if proper assumptions are made. It is sufficient
for us to show that they must be wrong, if they are programmed based on
incorrect assumptions.

*
The Earth has a natural “cooling system”. It continuously radiates
energy into space. ?? Any increase in temperatures automatically boosts
this radiation. The cooling power jumps up.

* “Global warming”
(i.e. a general increase of temperatures) requires this incremental
cooling to be compensated by an increase in heating power. ??
Accordingly, in order to achieve “global warming”, CO2 had to increase
the flow of energy from outside the system to the Earth’s surface. But
this is beyond even the claimed capabilities of this gas. Therefore CO2
cannot cause any warming.

* IR gases (“greenhouse gases”) cool
the Earth. The “natural greenhouse effect” (i.e. the warming) is a
myth. ?? Climate variability did and does exist. However, the CO2 level
in the atmosphere is not the cause. Aside from the sun itself, changing
cloud coverage is the main factor.

The 19th century theory of Arrhenius is the basis of greenhouse theory to this day

Svante
Arrhenius of Sweden came out with his 'big lie' or shoddy research in
1896 and was proven wrong within a year by rival Knut Angstrom.
Telegraph was too expensive for research communication, so peer review
of that age was incredibly slow by even our 'snail mail' standards. By
1900 the 'consensus' was that ARRHENIUS LIED.

Google "Knut
Angstrom on Atmospheric Absorption" in the US Weather Service Monthly
Weather Review, June 1901 for accepted peer review. It wasn't until 1906
that, then head of the Nobel Committee, Arrhenius admitted his error.
The 'carbon-climate forcing theory' fit in perfectly with the elites
embrace of the Malthus hypothesis on population, and Arrhenius was a
devote racial eugenics. Exterminate enough people and the world is a
better place.

This is a century old lie recycled by today's
elites to regain total control of the masses. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A
GREENHOUSE GAS.

'Hundreds
of millions of people may not have enough water. Floods, heat waves and
droughts may affect millions more. The ensuing migration could make the
world a very unstable place.'

This is blatant and shameless
scaremongering. The cautious verbs 'may' (twice) and 'could' (once)
provide the authors with some protection from total ridicule. It has
long been the case that these calamities 'may be true', or 'could
happen'. And of course, we know for sure that there will be people
'short of water', that there will be 'floods, heatwaves, and droughts',
and that there have been already substantial migrations and there may
well be more.

Despite the frail, or completely lacking,
justification for their views, campaigners under the banner of 'agw' or
'climate change, have had a substantial influence and are intent on
entrenching this in society by indoctrinating children. We must
therefore take these campaigners seriously - indeed they have already
done serious harm around the world: to children and to vulnerable
adults, to the poor and hungry, to the environment, to science, to
politics, and to technology.

Here they want to scare children
with three things: floods, heat waves, and droughts. As is usual with
environmental scare stories, a search of the literature will soon reveal
major flaws in the reasoning. For the examples below, I have taken
reports from the 'Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change' which exists to: 'disseminate factual reports and sound
commentary on new developments in the world-wide scientific quest to
determine the climatic and biological consequences of the ongoing rise
in the air's CO2 content.'

FLOODS: Example of scientific study

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V8/N1/C2.php

What was learned

'In
describing the results of their analyses, Mudelsee et al. report
finding, for both the Elbe and Oder rivers, "no significant trends in
summer flood risk in the twentieth century," but "significant downward
trends in winter flood risk during the twentieth century," which
phenomenon -- "a reduced winter flood risk during the instrumental
period" -- they specifically describe as "a response to regional
warming." '

What it means

The results of this study
provide no support for the IPCC "concern" that CO2-induced warming will
add to the risk of river flooding in Europe. If anything, they suggest
just the opposite.'

HEAT WAVES: Example of scientific study

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V10/N24/C1.php

What was learned

'Because
of the fact that depletion of soil moisture (which has long been
predicted to accompany CO2-induced global warming) results in reduced
latent cooling, Fischer et al. found that during all simulated heat wave
events, "soil moisture-temperature interactions increase the heat wave
duration and account for typically 50-80% of the number of hot summer
days," noting that "the largest impact is found for daily maximum
temperatures," which were amplified by as much as 2-3°C in response to
observed soil moisture deficits in their study....'

What it means

'....In
light of these complementary global soil moisture and river runoff
observations, it would appear that the anti-transpiration effect of the
historical rise in the air's CO2 content has more than compensated for
the soil-drying effect of concomitant global warming; and this
observation brings us to the ultimate point of our Journal Review. Based
upon (1) the findings of Fischer et al. (2007) that soil moisture
depletion greatly augments both the intensity and duration of summer
heat waves, plus (2) the findings of Robock et al. (2000, 2005) and Li
et al. (2007) that global soil moisture has actually increased over the
past half century, likely as a result of the anti-transpiration effect
of atmospheric CO2 enrichment - as Gedney et al. (2006) have also found
to be the case with closely associated river runoff - it directly
follows that the increase in soil moisture caused by rising atmospheric
CO2 concentrations will tend to decrease both the intensity and duration
of summer heat waves as time progresses.'

DROUGHT: Example of scientific study

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V9/N37/C1.php

What was learned

'In
the words of the two researchers, "droughts have, for the most part,
become [1] shorter, [2] less frequent, [3] less severe, and [4] cover a
smaller portion of the country over the last century." 'What it means

'It
would seem to be nigh unto impossible to contemplate a more stunning
rebuke of climate-alarmist claims concerning global warming and drought
than that provided by this study of the United States. And as evidenced
by the many materials archived under Drought in our Subject Index, much
the same findings are being reported all around the world.'

I
will give examples for Asia and Africa in the next {but one] post of
this series, but for now I want to end with some general points.

In
relatively warm periods, such as the Roman one, and the Medieval Warm
period, and our current one, humanity and the rest of nature thrived. A
cool period would be worse than a warm one for both. There is little
doubt that the end of our mostly very pleasant interglacial is due
within a few thousand years, and that if there is to be a credible
climate-related mass migration, it will be such as the evacuation of
Northern Europe - a process which would begin as soon as the winter
snows fail to melt in the summer - for the ice sheets will not slide
slowly down from the north, they will grow on the spot through
successive winters.

There is no indication that this will
happen soon. But, as and when it does, the wealthier we are, the more
technologically advanced we are, the better educated we are, the more
chance that it will be handled in a competent and humane fashion.
Scaring children about heat and CO2, rubbishing real scientists trying
to accumulate real knowledge instead of toeing a political line,
denigrating technology, crippling our lowest cost sources of energy, and
promoting guilt, fear, and ignorance in the young - none of that will
help - they merely disrupt progress and cause harm.

Nearly
$2bn in loan guarantees will be given to two companies to kick-start
the US solar energy industry, President Barack Obama has announced. One
of the firms, Abengoa Solar, says that it is planning to build the
largest solar power plant in the world in Arizona.

Mr Obama said
the projects would provide more than 5,000 new jobs. The Arizona plant
should power 70,000 homes and cut carbon dioxide emissions. The money
will come from government stimulus funds designed to boost the economy
during the recession.

Outlining the "Solana" project at Gila Bend
near Phoenix, Abengoa said it would have an area of 1,900 acres, using
thermal storage-equipped parabolic trough technology, with 280 MW of
power output capacity.

According to the company's website, 1,500
new jobs will be created during the plant's construction with 100
positions for staff to maintain it.

The second company, Abound
Solar Manufacturing, will manufacture state-of-the-art thin film solar
panels, the first time anywhere that such technology has been used
commercially, the BBC's Jane O'Brien reports from Washington.

Plants
will be built in Colorado and Indiana, creating 2,000 construction jobs
and 1,500 permanent jobs, the Associated Press reports.

President
Obama had promised during his election campaign for the White House to
create manufacturing and construction jobs in the green power industry.
"We're going to to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs
and industries of the future are taking root right here in America," he
said on Saturday.

The renewable energy industry in the US faces tough competition from developers in China.

Mr
Obama also acknowledged the loans would not be an instant solution.
Around 125,000 jobs were lost in the last month, the government
reported.

Energy
is the master resource. Without it other resources could not be
produced or consumed. Even energy requires energy: There would not be
usable oil, gas, or coal without the energy to manufacture and power the
requisite tools and machinery. Nor would there be wind turbines or
solar panels, which are monuments to embedded fossil-fuel energy.

And
just how important are fossil fuels relative to so-called renewable
energies? Oil, gas, or coal generates the electricity needed to fill in
for intermittent wind and solar power and ensure moment-to-moment
reliability. So renewable energy, ironically, is codependent on
nonrenewable energy short of (currently) prohibitively expensive battery
technology firming the flow of electricity....

Intellectual and
political debates over energy have revolved around four “sustainability”
issues: depletion, pollution, security, and climate change. Whole books
address these issues, most from the market-failure viewpoint,
concluding that mankind is on a perilous path and government-engineered
energy transformation is necessary.

But students of energy
history and energy policy must ask: Has a political makeover of any
industry ever worked well for consumers and taxpayers? Or has it had the
opposite effect? Creative destruction—a market makeover from shifting
consumer demand—is one thing; having government pick winners with
carrots and sticks is quite another.

Free-Market Sustainability

The
arguments for allowing free markets, rather than government planning,
to address the four sustainability issues can be summarized as follows:

1. Estimated quantities of recoverable oil, gas, and coal have been
increasing over time, according to the statistical record. Human
ingenuity in market settings has and will continue to overcome nature’s
limits, leaving in its wake errant forecasts of resource exhaustion. The
resource challenge is political: restricting access and perverting
incentives prevents the ultimate resource—human innovation and
entrepreneurship—from expanding energy supplies and multiplying energy’s
productive utilization.

2. Statistics of air and water
quality in the United States show dramatic environmental improvement
and, in fact, indicate a positive correlation between energy usage and
environmental improvement. While improvements have been achieved by
politicized, command-and-control environmental regulation, the results
could have been achieved at lower cost through market methods.

3.
Energy security in the electricity market is assured by abundant
domestic coal and the fact that almost all U.S. gas imports come from
Canada. Most of the oil needed for transportation comes from domestic
supplies supplemented by imports from a variety of countries led by
Canada and Mexico. Oil imports from unstable or unfriendly nations, such
as Venezuela and those in the Middle East, can be more effectively
addressed by privatizing U.S. oil and gas resources than by government
penalties against oil imports that cannot distinguish between “good” and
“bad” barrels. Even if the United States were to use the powers of
government to pare domestic oil consumption, the resulting drop in world
oil prices would encourage non-U.S. demand and subsidize foreign
industry. The world oil market will continue to exist and thrive even
with reduced U.S. participation, and this will become more true over
time.

4. The global warming scare is plagued by open
scientific questions, economic tradeoffs, and the reality that
carbon-based energy is necessary for economic growth. Carbon rationing
(via the Kyoto Protocol) is a failed policy for the developed world and a
nonstarter for the developing world. Not only have targeted reductions
proved to be elusive, the economic costs of carbon rationing are not
unlike those from (postulated) deleterious climate change.

The
recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico raises an additional
sustainability issue: unexpected setbacks that cause massive property
damage and even fatalities. Short-run problems, however, can result in
longer-term gains so long as the firm faces full liability and pays
restitution to the victims. Accountability in private property settings
encourages companies to square profits, people, and the environment—and
avoid the financial losses that come from performance failure. Currently
companies have their liability for damages capped by law at $75
million, though politics could potentially nullify the cap in any given
case, as it apparently will in the BP Deepwater Horizon incident.

Rather
than expand government, public policy should end preferential subsidies
for politically favored energies and privatize such assets as
public-land resources and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Multibillion-dollar energy programs at the U.S. Department of Energy
should be eliminated. Such policy reform can simultaneously increase
energy supply, improve energy security, reduce energy costs, and
increase the size of the private sector relative to the public sector.

To
Al Gore the “planetary emergency” is five billion to six billion people
using oil, gas, or coal for most of their energy needs. But the real
energy problem is that nearly one and a half billion people do not use
modern forms of energy. Rampant statism in place of private property,
voluntary exchange, and the rule of law is behind this problem.

Energy-impoverished
people use dried dung and primitive biomass to stay warm and cook their
meals, destroying their health and shortening their lives. Without
electricity or machines, they do not have clean water, reliable
lighting, or other means for comfortable, sanitary living. This
here-and-now problem demands energy freedom and an end to debilitating
energy statism.

The free-market vision stresses that these
impoverished people should not be subject to energy rationing by
government. Solar panels and industrial wind turbines can only generate a
fraction of the energy produced by diesel generators or a conventional
power plant—and are much less reliable. Energy brawn is needed, not
inferior but politically correct energies that appeal to energy
planners.

Attention warmists, the latest version 2.07
of the University of Colorado "Greenhouse Effect" java simulator is now
available! It provides an animation you can control to find out the
exact temperature from adding "lots" of "greenhouse" gases causing
unphysical back radiation in violation of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. "Lots" of back radiating
greenhouse gases will add enough work input to raise the global
temperatures 7°C! Plus don't miss the second tab at the top to show that
"greenhouse" gases are just like a pane of glass or even 3 panes! (please ignore RW Wood's classic 1909 paper which ripped to shreds the Arrhenius "glass pane" paper).

Radiochemist
Alan Siddons alerted me to this simulator and writes, "not only does it
falsely attribute radiative forcing to the IR-opacity of glass, but it
also (and by necessity) shows less IR escaping from the earth as the
greenhouse effect progresses. In fact, greenhouse theory asserts that
the SAME amount of IR escapes as the greenhouse effect progresses.
Consequently, more photons would have to appear out of nowhere in order
to simultaneously hold photons in and also release them. Somehow the
University of Colorado couldn't simulate that miracle." He also provided
this IPCC diagram with his added notations to help clarify this
phenomenon:

New Study: Kerry-Lieberman climate bill to
Destroy Up to 5.1 Million Jobs, Cost Families $1,042 per Year,
Wealthiest Americans to Benefit

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham
may no longer claim allegiance to the climate bill currently being
debated in the Senate, but according to a new independent analysis
released this week, the cap-and-trade proposal being advanced by Sens.
Kerry and Lieberman does no better by the American consumer than
previous iterations of the bill that bore his name.

In an effort
to better understand the broad consequences of the Kerry-Lieberman
American Power Act on the U.S. economy, the Institute for Energy
Research commissioned Chamberlain Economics, L.L.C to perform an
economic and distributional analysis of cap-and-trade portion of the
proposal.

The following represent some of the study's key findings:

* The American Power Act would reduce U.S. employment by roughly
522,000 jobs in 2015, rising to over 5.1 million jobs by 2050.

* Households would face a gross annual burden of $125.9 billion per
year or $1,042 per household, with costs disproportionately borne by
low-income households.

* On a net basis, the top income
quintile will benefit financially, redistributing to these households
roughly $12.3 billion per year from the bottom 80 percent of earners.

* Households over age 75 bear the largest burden at 2.3 percent of
income, followed by households aged 65-74 and under age 25 at 2.1
percent. By contrast, the nation's highest-earning households between
age 45 and 54 years would bear the smallest percentage burden of just
1.5 percent.

* Contrary to the legislation's stated goal of
reducing price volatility by excluding petroleum refiners from quarterly
auctions, the Kerry-Lieberman bill is likely to significantly increase
allowance price volatility from quarter to quarter, compared to an
ordinary auction in which all covered industries bid for allowances.

At
its core, the report examines the impacts that the American Power Act
would have on the U.S. economy, the method by which emission allowances
are distributed to corporations and the distributional cost of the bill
on households by income, age group, region and family type. The authors
also explore two specific propositions: the first, the potential for
shareholders, and not consumers, to benefit from the distribution of
free emission allowances; and, second, the expected consequences of the
bill's creation of a separate pool of allowances for petroleum refiners,
thus adding to the price volatility of those allowances. Both
conclusions are contrary to Kerry and Lieberman's stated intent of the
legislation.

"One of the most basic criticisms of climate policy
is its regressive impact on low-income households," said Andrew
Chamberlain, a co-author of the report and chief economist at
Chamberlain Economics L.L.C. "The Kerry-Lieberman bill holds true to
this by distributing most allowances freely to companies and government
agencies for the purpose of securing political support for the bill's
passage. Aside from the distributional impact of the bill,
Kerry-Lieberman suffers from serious flaws in its policy design. The
bill's exclusion of petroleum refiners from quarterly auctions-a
provision designed to shield refiners from price volatility-is instead
likely to have the opposite effect, increasing volatility faced by
covered entities with no obvious economic or environmental benefit."

"These
numbers speak for themselves: 522,000 lost jobs in 2015, up to 5.1
million in 2050," said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for
Energy Research. "Promoting a policy that guarantees job loss and
disproportionately impacts older Americans and those earning the least
will have devastating consequences. Senators Graham, Lieberman and Kerry
stated from the very beginning that their goal was to bring a coalition
of big oil executives, Wall Street titans and environmental groups to
the table - and that's exactly what they did. Unfortunately, as this
analysis shows, the one person that wasn't at the table ends up footing
the bill: the American consumer."

Michael
Mann was cleared on Thursday of the fourth in a series of questions
investigated by his employer, Penn State University. He had been cleared
of the first three in a preliminary phase of the investigation earlier
this year.

(Michael Mann is the scientist who created the now
infamous Hockey Stick chart that suggested that the current warming
period is unprecendented over the past 1,000 years. Heavily promoted by
the IPCC and published almost everywhere as an iconic symbol of global
warming, the Hockey Stick has also been heavily criticised. That
criticism has extended to Michael Mann's behaviour in defending the
chart and his methods of constructing it. I have been one of the
critics.)

It was clearly not a whitewash, and I'm sure that Mann
is relieved. I didn't publish this article yesterday, sort of as a
symbolic effort to give him one day of respite. Mann still has to go
through an investigation led by Virginia Attorney General Ken
Cuccinelli, which I think is really ill-advised, mean-spirited and
ultimately destructive of the relationship between government and
science going forward.

I have been very critical of Michael Mann
since even before the release of the Climategate emails. None of the
investigations held so far have answered my criticisms, nor the more
thoroughly documented versions of the same criticisms leveled by Steve
McIntyre.

That's because none of the investigations so far have
examined the actual science in question. The closest this recent
investigation came was interrogating a few witnesses about data handling
procedures.

The Penn State investigation is no different.
Shortly after the Climategate emails were leaked, they reacted to the
media firestorm by announcing an investigation, but they created their
own investigation scheme that did not include any of the accusations
that have been made and repeated on weblogs for about a decade.

To
be clear, even if McIntyre (after his exhaustive work) and my (more
casual examination--I piggy-backed heavily on McIntyre's work)
criticism's are 100% right, neither McIntyre nor I have written that
Mann did anything illegal or that rose to the level of a 'firing'
offense.

The crime that was committed (if it was committed--I
believe it was, but no charges have been filed) was evasion of the
Freedom of Information Act. This was done by Phil Jones of the Climatic
Research Unit in the United Kingdom, as described in our book,
Climategate: The CRUtape Letters.

What the hullabaloo about
Michael Mann has been is about performing bad science and then trying to
hide it during his defence of this science. The defence is normal--the
hiding was not. But it was not criminal, and it's clear that Mann very
consciously tried to stay right on the line of ethical behaviour as
well.

The bad science consisted of choosing faulty evidence (in
tree rings) to examine during his construction of the paleoclimatic
temperatures that comprised the very level temperature history before
modern times, and inventing a new and obviously inappropriate
statistical analysis method that guaranteed that his result would have
the shape of a Hockey Stick, no matter what data was input.

Mann's
poor behaviour consisted essentially of bullying colleagues, reviewers
and editors of scientific journals to support not only his science but
the political view that drove it--that climate change is the challenge
of the Millenium with potentially catastrophic results. As we wrote in
our book, Mann clearly believes this.

The remedy we have asked
for is a correction of the scientific record and more open sharing of
data and calculations by researchers trying to replicate Mann's (and
others') results.

A lot of harsh words have been written about
Mann, and I have written some of them. Mann took it pretty close to the
edge in defending flawed work, and the result has not been good for
science, the politics of climate change, or our response to it. Mann was
wrong to behave the way he did, in my opinion.

The Penn State
investigation, while not a whitewash, clearly and appropriately was
concerned with the risk Mann posed to their scientific reputation. The
Hockey Stick controversy occurred before Penn State hired Mann, and
although he showed up with a rock star reputation and the blessing of
the IPCC, it is clear that their focus was on ensuring that he played by
the rules of the game and was not a toxic asset that would become a
liability soon.

It is telling that one of their criteria for establishing his probity was Mann's ability to write successful proposals.

Previous
investigations of the Climategate affair were pretty much whitewashes.
Another one, led by Muir Russell, is expected to report soon. However,
it is not charged with investigating the science either. Which means
that nobody from the established community will be able to make the
point that Mann needs to hear. That his science was wrong, and that his
attempt to hide his errors hurt the community.

While I
congratulate him on his recent exoneration and hope that Ken Cuccinelli
wakes up and abandons what I consider to be a witch hunt, the questions
and criticisms posed by Steve McIntyre and many others, including
myself, remain unaddressed. Which sadly means that this affair is not
concluded.

Penn
State University is among top ten largest U.S. public schools. July
1st, 2010 will be remembered as a black day in its history.

An
official committee has unanimously "cleared" Michael Mann of research
misconduct even though explicit proofs of his misconduct are available
to the whole world:

They claim that those 60 megabytes of proofs that Mr. Mann has not been an honest scientist essentially don't exist.

Prof Richard Lindzen has described the "clearning" of Crook Michael Mann succintly:When
told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed
at the inquiry stage of the RA-lO process, Dr. Lindzen's response was:
"It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are issues that he explicitly
stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?"

Indeed, the
"accusations" that he has been "cleared of" are exactly the points that
have been explicitly described in the CRU e-mails, in some cases by
Michael Mann himself.

The complete lack of elementary morality
of these people is just stunning. Those people may feel comfortable in
their ivory towers but let me tell them that they're human trash and
organized criminals and we will eventually give them what they deserve.
No Tora Bora will be safe enough for them.

That's my message to
Ms Ass-mann, Mr Castleman, Ms Irwin, Ms Jablonski, and Mr Vondracek. I
have met people at Harvard who would behave in the same way and let me
tell you that I am proud of my stomach that throughout those long years,
I have never vomited.

Needless to say, the whitewash is being
celebrated by the extreme blogosphere who try to lie and laugh into your
eyes: Real Climate, Bad Astronomy, Eli Rabett, The Guardian, Climate
Progress, and others.

See discussions at Climate Audit and WUWT

During
an interview in front of a prison cell, Michael Mann claimed that he
was happy that he was "cleared". But his mood makes it clear that he
realizes that he wasn't cleared, cannot be cleared, and has no reason to
be happy.

Critical
evidence from climate change sceptics continues to be ignored by the
political and scientific establishments, says Christopher Booker

What
are we to make of the efforts by the political and academic
establishments to hold the line against all those revelations, such as
"Climategate", which last winter rocked the authority of the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The most obvious feature of
the four official inquiries into the "Climategate" emails (a fifth
report is due this week from Sir Muir Russell), is that not one has
engaged with the central point at issue. This is the evidence from the
emails and other documents confirming that the key IPCC scientists
involved had been manipulating data to show temperatures having lately
shot up to levels unknown in the past 1,000 years.

A familiar
example was the IPCC's "hockey stick" graph, created by the American
scientist Michael Mann, but shown by the statistics expert Steve
McIntyre to be no more than a statistical artefact. Last week, a second
inquiry by his own university cleared Dr Mann, again making no attempt
to discuss the central issue. Instead, it merely asserted - while
acclaiming him as "among the most respected scientists in his field" -
that the techniques used to compile his graph were wholly acceptable.

Similarly,
McIntyre was startled last week to get a dismissive email from Lord
Oxburgh, whose Science Appraisal Panel also avoided the crucial issue in
its perfunctory five-page report, bizarrely claiming that "the science
was not the subject of our study".

Also defending the
establishment line was last week's Panorama, with its "inquiry" into
Climategate. This example of BBC propaganda at its most childish
purported to be impartial, by pitching two advocates of man-made global
warming against two "sceptics", who turned out to be believers in
man-made warming.

Its centrepiece was yet another vindication of
the "hockey stick", including a sycophantic interview with Dr Mann.
Again, this gave not the faintest idea of how devastatingly the methods
used to compile this graph have been challenged (for full accounts see A
W Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption
of Science, or my book The Real Global Warming Disaster).

Meanwhile,
there has been a further twist to that other IPCC scandal,
"Amazongate", on which I reported last week. This centred on the claim
in its 2007 report - attributed only to a paper from green activists at
the WWF - that a slight reduction in rainfall caused by climate change
could kill up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. After exhaustive
analysis by my colleague Dr Richard North of every document cited by the
WWF to back its claim, it seems clearer than ever that there is no good
evidence.

I have given the WWF one more chance to come up with
that evidence, and will reveal its response next week. If it is unable
to do so, the IPCC will again be convicted of having made a wildly
alarmist claim it cannot justify. Yet this is the body on whose
allegedly unimpeachable scientific authority our Government and others
propose to land us with the biggest bill in history.

G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy

Last
week's G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that
the world's leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One
year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two
degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a
nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change - and not to try
to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 - which
now carries more clout than the G8 - went from nebulous to non-existent:
The G20's draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green
technologies faded into a mere commitment to "a green economy and to
sustainable global growth."

These leaders' collective decisions
in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to
avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom
have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their
global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia's gung-ho
global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to
fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia's conservative
opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an
anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.'s gung-ho
global-warming leader during last year's G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon
Brown, likewise lost his job.

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy,
who had vowed to "save the human race" from climate change by
introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed
man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in
March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw
his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the
message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain?
Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister Jos‚ Luis Rodr¡guez
Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided
to gut his country's renewables industry by unilaterally rescinding the
government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding
would put most of his country's 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of
business. Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped
government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8
and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making
the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that
came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments
responsible for climate-change policies - previously immune to cuts -
must now contract by an extraordinary 25%. Other U.K. departments are
also ditching climate-change programs - the casualties include
manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and,
as the minister in charge put it, "every commitment made by the last
government on renewables is under review." Some areas of the economy not
only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record
offshore oil development in the North Sea - the U.K. granted a record
356 exploration licences in its most recent round.

Support for
global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show
- as in Europe - that the great majority rejects global-warming
catastrophism. The public resents repeated attempts to pass cap and
trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in
popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress. Public opinion
surveys now predict that this November's elections will see sweeping
change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the
global-warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don't buy it.

In
the lead-up to the Toronto meetings and throughout them, one country -
Canada - and one leader - Prime Minister Stephen Harper - have stood out
for avoiding the worst excesses associated with climate change. Dubbed
the Colossal Fossil three years running by some 500 environmental groups
around the world, Canada - and especially Harper - are reviled among
climate-change campaigners for failing to fall into line.

Not
coincidentally, Canada has also stood out for having best withstood the
financial crisis that beset the world. Fittingly, Canada and its leader
played host to the meetings.

Documents
released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library show members of
President Richard Nixon's inner circle discussing the possibilities of
global warming more than 30 years ago.

Adviser Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the
administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming
came to the public's attention.

There is widespread agreement
that carbon dioxide content will rise 25 percent by 2000, Moynihan wrote
in a September 1969 memo. "This could increase the average
temperature near the earth's surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit," he wrote.
"This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New
York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter."

Moynihan was Nixon's
counselor for urban affairs from January 1969 – when Nixon began his
presidency – to December 1970. He later served as the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations before New York voters elected him to the Senate.

Moynihan
received a response in a January 26, 1970 memo from Hubert Heffner,
deputy director of the administration's Office of Science and
Technology. Heffner acknowledged that atmospheric temperature rise was
an issue that should be looked at.

"The more I get into this, the
more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent
majority in between," he wrote. "One group says we will turn into
snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other
says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due
to the temperature rise."

Heffner wrote that he would ask the Environmental Science Services Administration to look further into the issue.

Nixon
established the Environmental Protection Agency and had an interest in
the environment. In one memo, Moynihan noted his approval of the first
Earth Day, to be held April 22, 1970.

Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists

By Matt Ridley

When
I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The
adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable,
mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the
environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a
year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was
choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to
be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had -
that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of
Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at
least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the
time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything
optimistic to me - in a lecture, a television program or even a
conversation in a bar - about the future of the planet and its people,
at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.

The next two
decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the
loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals
were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus
were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with
the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are
confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within
nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and
the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for
our well-being.'

By then I had begun to notice that this terrible
future was not all that bad. In fact every single one of the dooms I
had been threatened with had proved either false or exaggerated. The
population explosion was slowing down, famine had largely been conquered
(except in war-torn tyrannies), India was exporting food, cancer rates
were falling not rising (adjusted for age), the Sahel was greening, the
climate was warming, oil was abundant, air pollution was falling fast,
nuclear disarmament was proceeding apace, forests were thriving, sperm
counts had not fallen. And above all, prosperity and freedom were
advancing at the expense of poverty and tyranny.

I began to pay
attention and a few years ago I started to research a book on the
subject. I was astounded by what I discovered. Global per capita income,
corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy
had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds,
the population growth rate had halved. More people had got out of
poverty than in all of human history before. When I was born, 36% of
Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty
line had air conditioning. The emissions of pollutants from a car were
down by 98%. The time you had to work on the average wage to buy an hour
of artificial light to read by was down from 8 seconds to half a
second.

Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also
healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal.
Check it out - the data is clear. Yet if anything the pessimists had
only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end
of nature', the `coming anarchy', a `stolen future', our `final
century' and a climate catastrophe. Why, I began to wonder did the
failure of previous predictions have so little impact on this litany?

I
soon found out. Like others who have tried to draw attention to
improving living standards - notably Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg - I
am beginning to be subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification by
the pessimists. They distort my argument, impugn my motives and attack
me for saying things I never said. They say I think the world is perfect
when I could not be clearer that I advocate progress precisely because
we should be ambitious to put right so much that is still wrong. They
say that I am a conservative, when it is the reactionary mistrust of
change that I am attacking. They say that I am defending the rich, when
it is the enrichment of the poor that I argue for. They say that I am
complacent, when the opposite is true. I knew this would happen, and I
take it as a back-handed compliment, but the ferocity is still
startling. They are desperate to shut down the debate rather than have
it.

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news
when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in
telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of
bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend
hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best
fund-raiser. Where is the news media's interest in checking out how
pessimists' predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count,
Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of
agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul
Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40
years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point'.

Ah,
that phrase again. I call it turning-point-itis. It's rarely far from
the lips of the prophets of doom. They are convinced that they stand on
the hinge of history, the inflexion point where the roller coaster
starts to go downhill. But then I began looking back to see what
pessimists said in the past and found the phrase, or an equivalent,
being used by in every generation. The cause of their pessimism varied -
it was often tinged with eugenics in the early twentieth century, for
example - but the certainty that their own generation stood upon the
fulcrum of the human story was the same.

I got back to 1830 and
still the sentiment was being used. In fact, the poet and historian
Thomas Macaulay was already sick of it then: `We cannot absolutely prove
that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning
point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and
with just as much apparent reason.' He continued: `On what principle is
it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect
nothing but deterioration before us.'

The
cause of temperature change is hard to determine because humans cannot
create another earth without humans as control as the common experiments
do. Therefore the cause of temperature change is more or less likely to
be determined by using models to fit the recorded temperature: the
underlined cause for the model, which fits the recorded temperature
best, would be the cause inducing temperature change.

Current Modeling

Recently
when we studied the possible impact of global warming on the evolution
of protein families from influenza A viruses [see, publications], we
noticed the fluctuations in recorded temperature. These fluctuations
cannot explained by the current climate models because their outputs are
smooth curves representing the temperature trend. This leads us to
consider whether we need to consider a random model, of which the random
walk model comes first.

Fitting of Global Temperature using Random Walk Model

Very
recently, we used the random walk model to fit the temperature walk,
which is the conversion of recorded temperature, and the recorded
temperature, and we got a relatively good fit (see the following
figures) although we cannot compare our results with the results
obtained from other models because they are not available.

Cause of Temperature Change

If
the underlined cause of a fitting model is the cause of temperature
change, then our fittings would suggest that the temperature change is
mainly due to the random mechanism, which however could be the
combination of all the known and unknown factors because some of them
are difficult to explicitly present.

More pesky findings from China. Chinese scientists are clearly not in the (Greenie) club of the righteous and the holy

We
constantly hear that the warmest years on record have all occurred in
the most recent decades, and of course, we are led to believe this must
be a result of the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. In most places,
we have approximately 100 years of reliable temperature records, and we
wonder if the warmth of the most recent decades is unusual, part of some
cyclical behavior of the climate system, or a warm-up on the heels of a
cold period at the beginning of the record. A recent article in
Geophysical Research Letters has an intriguing title suggesting a 2,000
year temperature record now exists for China – we definitely wanted to
see these results of this one.

The article was authored by six
scientists with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the State
University of New York at Albany, and Germany’s Justus-Liebig University
in Giessen; the research was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the United States
Department of Energy. In their abstract, Ge et al. tell us “The analysis
also indicates that the warming during the 10–14th centuries in some
regions might be comparable in magnitude to the warming of the last few
decades of the 20th century.” From the outset, we knew we would welcome
the results from any long-term reconstruction of regional temperatures.

The
authors begin noting that “The knowledge of past climate can improve
our understanding of natural climate variability and also help address
the question of whether modern climate change is unprecedented in a
long-term context.” We agree! Ge et al. explain that “Over the recent
past, regional proxy temperature series with lengths of 500–2000 years
from China have been reconstructed using tree rings with 1–3 year
temporal resolution, annually resolved stalagmites, decadally resolved
ice-core information, historical documents with temporal resolution of
10–30 years, and lake sediments resolving decadal to century time
scales.”

However, the authors caution “these published
proxy-based reconstructions are subject to uncertainties mainly due to
dating, proxy interpretation to climatic parameters, spatial
representation, calibration of proxy data during the reconstruction
procedure, and available sample numbers.”

Ge et al. used a series
of multivariate statistical techniques to combine information from the
various proxy methods, and the results included the reconstruction of
regional temperatures and an estimate of uncertainty for any given year.
They also analyzed temperature records from throughout China over the
1961 to 2007 period and established five major climate divisions in the
country

The bottom line for this one can be found in our Figure 2
that shows the centennially-smoothed temperature reconstruction for the
five regions of China. With respect to the Northeast, Ge et al. comment
“During the last 500 years, apparent climate fluctuations were
experienced, including two cold phases from the 1470s to the 1710s and
the 1790s to the 1860s, two warm phases from the 1720s to the 1780s, and
after the 1870s. The temperature variations prior to the 1500s show two
anomalous warm peaks, around 300 and between approximately 1100 and
1200, that exceed the warm level of the last decades of the 20th
century.” The plot for the Northeast shows warming in the 20th century,
but it appears largely to be somewhat of a recovery from an unusually
cold period from 1800 to 1870. Furthermore, the plot shows that the recent warming is less than warming that has occurred in the past.

The
Central East region also has a 2,000 year reconstruction and Ge et al.
state “The 500-year regional coherent temperature series shows
temperature amplitude between the coldest and warmest decade of 1.8°C.
Three extended warm periods were prevalent in 1470s–1610s, 1700s–1780s,
and after 1900s. It is evident that the late 20th century warming stands
out during the past 500 years. Considering the past 2000 years, the
winter half-year temperature series indicate that the
three warm peaks (690s–710s, 1080s–1100s and 1230s–1250s), have
comparable high temperatures to the last decades of the 20th century.”
No kidding – the plot for the Central East region shows that the warmth
of the late 20th century was exceeded several times in the past.

Commenting
on the Tibet reconstruction, Ge et al. state “The warming period of
twenty decadal time steps between the 600s and 800s is comparable to the
late 20th century.” In the Northwest, they note “Comparable warm
conditions in the late of 20th century are also found around the decade
1100s.” Unfortunately, no long-term reconstruction was possible for the
Southeast region.

In summarizing their work, Ge et al. report :

The
warming level in the last decades of the 20th century is unprecedented
compared with the recent 500 years. However, comparing with the
temperature variation over the past 2000 years, the warming during the
last decades of the 20th century is only apparent in the TB region,
where no other comparable warming peak occurred. For the regions of NE
and CE, the warming peaks during 900s–1300s are higher than that of the
late 20th century, though connected with relatively large uncertainties.

We
get the message – the recent warming in at least several regions in
China has likely been exceeded in the past millennium or two, the rate
of recent warming was not unusual, and the observed warming of the 20th
century comes after an exceptionally cold period in the 1800s.

Declaring
that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have pushed modern
temperature beyond their historical counterparts disregards the lessons
of 2,000 years of Chinese temperatures.

Global warming: Interview with John Christy--Models, sensitivity, the PNAS paper and more

John
Christy is an atmospheric scientist and Professor of same at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville, and winner of achievement awards
from NASA and the American Meteorological Society. He was a lead author
of the IPCC's 2001 Assessment Report, but in 2007 was quoted in the Wall
Street Journal as saying, "I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my
IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing
catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame
for most of the warming we see."

The awards he received were for
his work in helping develop a temperature dataset based on satellite
measurements, and one of the major datasets used in climate science is
just known as UAH. He is commonly perceived as a skeptic, but as has
been the case with every interview I've done in this sector, the truth
is far more nuanced. Professor Christy was kind enough to respond to my
request for an interview very quickly, so without further ado...

Examiner:
You are commonly labeled as a 'skeptical' scientist who does not agree
with the IPCC consensus regarding human contributions to climate change.
How accurate is that, and how would you describe your own beliefs
regarding this?

J.C. I am mainly skeptical about those who claim
to be so confident in understanding the climate system that they know
what it is going to do in the next 100 years. This is my main complaint -
overconfidence. We of all professions should be the most humble because
there is so much about the climate system that we simply do not know.
See my testimony given to the Inter Academy Council in June concerning
these ideas - I think you will appreciate it.

(In his June
testimony to the Inter Academy Council, Christy testifed that he felt
the IPCC's overconfidence in climate models was not justified. He also
said: "The first objection I raised regarding the Third Assessment was
that the fabled Hockey Stick was oversold as an indicator of past
climate change. This was well before the critical work of the Wegman
Report, National Academy of Sciences, McIntyre’s papers and the East
Anglia emails. Indeed, I urge you in the strongest terms to engage
Stephen McIntyre in your deliberations at a high level as he has
accurately documented specific failures in the IPCC process, some of
which I can attest to, as I was there.")

Examiner: What
unresolved issue or issues should the scientific community be focussing
its gaze on with regards to climate change in 2010? Atmospheric
sensitivity to a doubling of CO2?

J.C. Evidence is building that the sensitivity is less than models assume.

Examiner: The role of the oceans in exchange of CO2 and heat?

J.C. This relates to sensitivity.

Examiner: The role of the clouds?

J.C.
This is directly related to sensitivity, i.e. how do the reflective
clouds respond to an impulse of warming - evidence indicates they expand
(reflecting more sunlight) and counteract the warming. This has also
been shown for cooling events, i.e. that clouds contract when a global
cool spell occurs to let in more sun and warm the planet.

Examiner: The accuracy of the historical records?

J.C. This is an ongoing effort - to build an archive of raw observations in which all parties have confidence.

Examiner: What are you personally focussing on in your work?

J.C.
Measurements of all types. I just recently had a paper on snowfall in
the southern Sierra published showing no trend in the last 94 years
which indicates natural water resources in the San Joaquin Valley are
fine, so that shortages are clearly a function of management and law
(see attached). I am still building temperature datasets of the surface
and upper air to document the response (temperature is a good response
variable to forcing) of the atmosphere to forcings of all types.

Examiner: What are your beliefs about what is happening to the Earth's climate?

J.C.
Natural variability is still the major driver of the climate changes
that create challenges for society. The one confident conclusion we can
make about added CO2 is that the biosphere has clearly been invigorated -
plants love what we do with carbon-based energy because its by-product
is CO2 - plant food. (I can hear the shrieks of horror all the way here
in Alabama from California, my home state.)

Examiner: What do you think governments and their citizens should be doing to protect our environment and our future?

J.C.
In my experience, the wealthier the country is, the better is its
environment (mainly because energy in wealthy societies is produced in
high density processes like power plants rather than gathering of wood
and biomass which destroys habitats.) Policies that allow human wealth
and security to be enhanced are policies that can sell. The wealthier a
society is, the greater emphasis it can put on protecting natural
habitats, cleaning the air and water, and protecting its citizens from
threats of all kinds (i.e. disease, weather disasters, etc.) This wealth
building occurs best in democratically accountable societies which
establish human rights for all citizens, including women and children.

Examiner:
Paul Krugman recently took up a current argument that in the face of
uncertainty our actions should be more vigorous, not less. How would you
respond to this?

J.C. Will these actions advocated by Krugman
cause economic decline, lower standard of living, etc? If so, they don't
have a chance in a democratically accountable society. I think we are
creating more certainty about the idea that the climate is less
sensitive to CO2 than promoted in the past 2 decades. We are not all
going to die on a roasting planet. The real challenge today is to
prepare for the unquestionable continued rise in energy demand. Energy
makes life much, much better in countless ways, so it's demand will only
increase, especially in poorer countries. At some point, even
carbon-based energy won't meet the demand, so new and voluminous sources
of energy are needed ... and the sooner the better.

Examiner:
Stephen Schneider recently co-authored a paper published in PNAS
exploring the level of expertise found in scientists who support the
consensus position on climate change compared to those who do not agree
with the consensus. What is your reaction to this paper?

J.C. I
was one of only three scientists who made both the "good guy" and the
"bad guy" lists. Quite an honor I suppose. However, I think the study
was pathetic. It basically says, "Those of us who agree with each other
like to cite the work of our friends and not the other guys." Duh. (One
of my fellow scientists calls this "tribalism" - an appropriately
primitive description.) I think the more sinister motive was evident in
that the paper chided the media, such at the SF Chronicle, to stop
investigative-reporting and just "trust us" (the guys on the "good guys"
list) when it comes to climate change. It really was an attempt to make
a blacklist. In that sense, I guess I ended up being gray, which fits
my hair color now.

Examiner: The IPCC accepts the submission of
general circulation models from all participating countries. I think
there are 23 or 24 of them right now. Is that a useful number of models
to analyze?

J.C. What you want is a set of models that at least
represent the real atmosphere (which none of these do faithfully
relative to tests we've performed.) This does seem like a high (and
expensive) number.

Examiner: Does an average derived from an
ensemble of models tell us anything useful? If so, what? If not, what
are the defects of looking at an ensemble of models.

J.C.
Probably not. Cloud processes and responses are particularly off the
mark (or at least widely varying). The question here addresses a fault
with consensus - over time, individuals tend to drift toward consensus
(a human foible) whether it is right or wrong. Many of the
parameterizations in the models are very similar and could be very
wrong, so agreement with each other is often a dangerous result as it
confirms one's prejudices and gives one a false sense of success. I deal
in the world of observations - i.e. what does the real world show. What
we find is that models have a long way to go, which is a little ironic
because they modelers have a legitimate reason to clamor for more
funding to improve their poorly-performing models.

Examiner:
Human emissions of CO2 declined 2.6% in 2009, although concentrations
didn't change. How hopeful are you that our actions can reduce emissions
further?

J.C. It is very clear that economic decline means less
energy is used, and people are poorer as a result. So, one should
congratulate those who created the recent economic collapse for the
"good" news on emissions. However, I don't see economic decline as a
long-term strategy for society to follow. The most useful option to slow
the decline in emissions is to proceed on a massive construction
initiative in nuclear power (which has other defensible reasons to back
it up - not just alleged climate change.) In this way, gigawatts of
power can be produced with little emissions. Alternatives (wind, solar,
animal methane) will be just an expensive and unreliable blip on the
world-wide scale of emissions growth.

Examiner: What is your best guess or opinion on what will happen to the Earth's climate over the coming decades?

J.C.
The climate will throw some surprises at us and the interannual
variations that we've always had will continue to cause the greatest
developmental challenges. As I said 22 years ago my general rule of
climate is: "If it happened before, it will happen again ... and
probably worse." Are we prepared for the variations we have already
experienced (i.e. 1930's, 1950's droughts, 1993 floods, any hurricane,
freeze of 2007, snow of 2009-10, etc.?"). If we are prepared for those,
anything induced by humans on top of the climate system's large natural
variability will be manageable in my view.

ENOUGH'S
enough. If you're really this keen to vote Green in the state election,
why not prove you're serious? Why not live the life you apparently
want the Greens to inflict on the rest of us? Go turn off your own
lights first. Kill your fridge. Cook your roast over a solar-powered
candle.

Then go to work and turn off the machines. Junk the
computer. Tell your hospital to switch off the machines that go "bing".
And harness some donkeys to pull our trains. Can't find donkeys, you
say? Nonsense. Look at yesterday's Newspoll, which reports a record 18
per cent of Victorians plan to vote Green. Plenty there. Hook 'em up.

And
who knows what desperate deal Premier John Brumby will now do to win
the Greens preferences that are critical to Labor getting the 51 to 49
per cent edge over the Coalition that Newspoll assumes?

We've
already seen what depths of insanity Labor will cater to, to prove it's
as green as the next idiot. Why else has this great city been on water
restrictions for an embarrassing seven years? Why this insane ban on a
new dam for our fast-growing capital?

Why did the Government wait
until it was almost too late to even start building its new $3.5
billion desalination plant, at three times the price of a dam for a
third of the water? Madness, and the Greens promise yet more of it - and
less of everything else.

Take just one of their policies, one that 18 per cent of shiny-eyed Victorians evidently now support.

The
Greens demand the instant closure of Hazelwood power station to save
the world from global warming. It's a noble policy, which sounds warm
and fuzzy, until you realise it will leave us cold and shivering, while
making not a spit of difference to the planet.

Now I don't want to seem like a
spoilsport, but I would just like to be reassured on one small point:
how the hell do the Greens then plan to power our state? After all,
they don't plan to stop at Hazelwood, either. Their policy is to shut
every coal-fired plant, leaving us with just 5 per cent of the
electricity we now use - with nuclear power banned, new hydro power
banned and wind power as reliable as, well, the wind.

It's
madness of the kind you get from a child who wants her fifth ice cream
but not the upchuck that goes with it. Still, you'd think the Greens
would have worked out by now these small details about how to keep the
lights burning....

If you think this is remotely possible, dear
Greens voter, consider first that this state is actually predicted to
need 50 per cent more power by 2030, even though many companies, hit
with higher power bills, have tried for years to cut their use.

Then
go around your home - and, more importantly, your factory - and switch
off half the power. With all appliances off, look proudly at the
appalled people around you in winter and say, "Isn't it great we're all
freezing to death for the planet?" Or, in summer, for variety, ask:
"Isn't it lovely to be sweating in this furnace now that I've switched
off the aircon?"

And then, by the kerosene lamp at home, try to
figure out the next step. After all, you're still only halfway to
replacing the 95 per cent of electricity the Greens plan to ban.

Let
me just try to get it through your cable-knit beanie how impossible
that is without reducing this state to the standard of living endured by
people who burn cow dung for their cooking.

For Earth Hour this
year, the zealots at Melbourne University tried especially hard to cut
their power. The university exhorted staff and students to do their best
to save the planet from their electricity, and to "turn off all lights
and appliances". All of them. And the result? Read the University's
boast: "Electricity consumption on the Earth Hour weekend dropped by
5.51 per cent compared with a 2010 business as usual weekend."

Less
than 6 per cent? After all that special sacrifice? For just one
weekend? Whoopee do. And that's from a mere university, mind, which
runs no heavy industry or essential services, and had almost no one in
the joint over that weekend actually wanting to work or switch on so
much as a toaster or kettle. Just 90 per cent to go, guys, before you
live the Greens' dream.

But there I go, trying to marry
consequence to action, like I was an adult or something. Don't I realise
the times have changed? After all, this is the Age of the Use Less, in
which our brainless and godless rich resent their own wealth - well,
resent the wealth of everyone else, at least. And then, for penance,
suggest ingenious ways to make us poor again.

Example: remember
how this Labor Government told us for years we didn't need more water
supplies, claiming we could get by if we just Used Less? And so our
ovals turned brown, our gardens died and we broke our backs carting
buckets to the most precious of our plants. Use Less, heaven!

Ah,
but you think I exaggerate this madness of our times. So let me
introduce you to the latest guru of this Use Less creed, "anti-poverty
crusader" Richard Fleming, as featured this week in the Herald Sun and
on Channel 7's Today Tonight.

He, too, preaches Use Less, or eat
less, actually. He's promoting his $2 a day "Live Below the Line" diet,
which restricts you to eating the very cheapest of foods - hummus,
watery soup, dahl, rice, marmalade and peanut paste.

No real
reason for this torture, other than to make you realise what it must be
like to be some starving Bangladeshi, wishing you were lucky enough to
live in a country where you had so much to eat that you'd, er, starve
yourself instead. Out of sheer, mindless guilt.

"There's a level
of stupidity in all this," Fleming admits, but he should be less hard on
himself. He's the poster boy of a state in which so many
finger-waggers want to deny the rest of us the harvest of our science
and ingenuity - cooling on hot days, heating on cold ones, water for
green gardens and food for a feast.

Fine, if that's what you want
for yourself. But, please, before you vote to inflict this on the rest
of us, first try living as the Greens prescribe and see if it truly
suits even high-minded you. Lights out. Heating, too. Starve and shiver
for your faith. At least live as miserably as you plan to vote.

It's been known since the 18th century
that solar changes and climate changes on earth are correlated. Two
centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the
number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At
solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed,
temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell.

But
since the climate changes were much larger than the solar changes, no
causal mechanism was apparent and the correlation was therefore ignored
by climate scientists. While feedback mechanisms were enthusiastically
proposed to predict amplificatory effects of rising CO2 levels, any
search for amplificatory mechanisms on solar change was sedulously
ignored. In recent years, Svensmark has finally found one amplificatory
mechanism but that may not be the end of the story -- JR.

In
the early 1990's a paper by Christensen was published that showed a
striking correlation between the length of the sun's sunspot cycle and
the global average annual temperature, Fig 1. The shorter the cycle
(short cycles are more intense) the higher was the earth's annual
temperature. It seemed to indicate that the sun was the dominant
influence on the earth's temperature variations.

It
is certainly striking that since the later part of the 19th century and
throughout the 20th century there has been a general increase in the
Earth's global average temperature at the same time that the strength of
the solar cycle was increasing in intensity as measured by the number
of sunspots. In the last half of the 20th century four out of the five
most intense solar cycles occurred (the second largest cycle was around
1780) including the strongest ever which was in the 1950's.

Christensen
linked these two together in what appeared to be a pleasing way.
However, a few years after the work was published others found flaws in
the way the final four (out of 24) data points were plotted. In
Christensen's paper the length of the solar cycle decreased between 1950
- 1990 with the last data point showing that the cycle length shortened
at the same time that the recent global warming period started (post
1980). When this was corrected the concordance between the solar cycle
length and the earth's rising temperature broke down as it became
apparent that the length of the solar cycle showed no trend as the
earth's temperature rose post-1980.

It
was heralded as proof of the hypothesis that the recent, post-1980
warming spell could not be due to the sun. Whereas many argued that the
sun was the dominant factor prior to this period, the rate of warming
was recently too great to be accounted for without a human influence.

It
is now clear that in the past decade or so our sun has been behaving
differently from the way it did during the 20th century. The current
sunspot minimum has gone on for far longer than was expected. It did
begin to show signs of an upturn in activity earlier this year, but has
since faltered again. Some have suggested that this is a sign of the
start of a new Dalton-like minimum - a period of low solar activity that
occurred about 1800.

Since the invention of the telescope and
with it the ability to monitor the frequency of sunspots there has been
two periods when sunspots were lacking. They are the Dalton Minima,
which lasted about 20 years and the much longer Maunder Minimum of
approx 1640 -1710. Both periods are coincident with cooler conditions on
earth though we do not have a satisfactory explanation for how this
occurs. Some believe that the Maunder Minimum can be explained by a
combination of a reduction in solar radiation combined with volcanic
effects, other are not so sure.

It is interesting to see that as
time goes by more and more solar scientists are expressing the
possibility that it might be the start of a period similar to the
Maunder Minimum. Only time will tell.

The important point is that
in previous periods of relatively low solar activity the solar cycle
behaved differently than it did when solar activity was stronger.

In
broad agreement with the Christensen relationship, during the Dalton
Minimum the period of the solar cycle increased. The longest cycle ever
recorded was during the Dalton period. Also as sunspot numbers declined
at the start of the period the solar cycle became more symmetrical and
cycle rise and fall times converged at about 6 years.

The last
complete solar cycle, number 23 lasted 12.6 years (May 1996 - Dec 2008).
Only four solar cycles have lasted longer than 12 years. Two of them,
cycle 4 (1784 - 1798: 13.7 years) and cycle 5 (1798 - 1810: 12.6 years)
occurred just before and during the Dalton Minimum.

What's more
cycle 22 was unusually short (Sept 86 - May 1996: 9.7 years). There have
been only two other solar cycles that have been shorter, Cycle 2 and
cycle 3 which occurred immediately prior to the lengthy cycles of the
Dalton Minimum.

Scrutinising the gradient of sunspot cycle rise
and falls it is obvious that usually the cycle rise is more rapid than
the fall. During the Dalton Minima however they became equal. Then they
resumed their normal relationship only to move once more to equality
around 1910 when there were a few relatively weaker sunspot cycles. It
is possible that the same thing is happening again. If so this would
imply an approx 100 year periodicity, though this is only am impression,
as we only have reliable sunspot records since about 1750.

It is
possible that changes in solar cycle lengths take place before periods
of low solar activity, like the one we may be entering at present, and
that might influence the later part of figure 1. If this is the case
then the breakdown in the Christensen relationship post 1980 cannot be
said with certainty to be due to the rise of human influences on the
climate above solar ones.

Citizens of the Golden State get nervous about carbon rationing plans made in flusher times

When
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law mandating a dramatic reduction
in greenhouse gases, California's economy was in a very different place.
It was 2006. Unemployment was 4.5 percent. Thanks to inflated home
values, residents felt rich. Today 12.5 percent of Californians are out
of work, the government is in a budgetary meltdown, and a movement is
brewing to stop those carbon cuts from kicking in.

The Global
Warming Solutions Act, a.k.a. AB 32, seeks to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions through a mix of policies, including a cap-and-trade carbon
market, fuel efficiency standards for appliances and buildings, a
requirement that 33 percent of the state's energy be produced from
renewable sources, a low-carbon fuel standard for vehicles, and zoning
changes to discourage automobile travel.

AB 32's proponents say
it will create a plethora of new "green jobs." Cynthia Verdugo-Peralta,
founder of VPC Energy and of Strategic Energy, Environmental &
Transportation Alternatives, recently declared, "When it comes to job
growth, there is substantial, irrefutable evidence that growing more
efficient and greener will create jobs, not kill them." That, she
explained, is "why I am heartened that CARB's new economic analysis
reaffirms the benefits of implementing California's Global Warming
Solutions Act."

Verdugo-Peralta was referring to a March report
from the California Air Resources Board, the agency that will oversee
carbon rationing. Its analysis finds that implementing emission cuts
will increase the price of electricity by up to 20 percent, the price of
natural gas by 13 percent to 76 percent, and the price of gasoline by 6
percent to 47 percent.

Though it uses the same data, a competing
analysis by the global consulting firm Charles River Associates finds
the costs of carbon rationing are likely to be higher. This is primarily
because measures such as the requirement that 33 percent of
California's electricity come from renewable sources will boost overall
costs. By 2020, Charles River Associates estimates, the 2006 law will
increase California's electricity prices by 11 percent to 32 percent,
while gasoline and diesel prices will rise by 14 percent to 51 percent.

The
CARB best-case analysis estimates that the new mandates and carbon
market will increase employment slightly by 2020 and that per capita
income will rise by about $30 per person, by 2020. In its worst-case
scenario, incomes would be reduced by about $300 per capita.

By contrast, the Charles River analysis finds that implementing AB 32 will reduce incomes by $200 to $500 per person by 2020.

The
cost differences between the two analyses arise largely from how they
treat the mandates. The CARB report suggests that the higher energy
prices will be completely offset by conservation and energy efficiency
requirements embedded in the law because they will force Californians to
reduce the amount of electricity and fuel they use. The Charles River
study concludes that the costs of implementing those mandates more than
outweigh their benefits.

With regard to "green jobs," the CARB's
best-case analysis estimates that implementing AB 32 will add 10,000
jobs by 2020; its worst case projects 330,000 fewer jobs than there
would otherwise have been. Just before the release of the new CARB
report, the California Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) issued an
analysis of the law's net impact on jobs in California. While it did not
offer firm figures, the LAO analysis took into account increases in
"green jobs" and job losses in other sectors, especially fossil fuel
industries, and found that "the aggregate net jobs impact in the near
term is likely to be negative." It added that "in a relative sense,
however, [the law's] effect on jobs in both the near term and longer
term will probably be modest in comparison to the overall size of the
state's economy." Even under the best of circumstances, California's
carbon rationing scheme will not produce enough "green jobs" to make a
significant dent in the state's very high unemployment rate.

Surprisingly,
the Golden State's green-economy boosters seem to agree. Consider the
report issued in December 2009 by Next 10, an environmental think tank
in San Francisco. The media widely quoted this upbeat claim from the
report: "California green jobs increased by 36 percent from 1995-2008
while total jobs expanded only 13 percent. As the economy slowed between
2007-2008, total employment fell 1 percent, but green jobs continued to
grow by 5 percent." A 36 percent increase sounds impressive. But when
you look at the actual numbers, green jobs increased from 117,000 in
1995 to 159,000 in 2008 and currently constitute about 1 percent of
California's total employment. A 5 percent increase in green employment
amounts to about 8,000 jobs.

These numbers are trivial in the
context of California's current economic troubles. Between January 2007
and January 2008, some 182,000 Californians lost their jobs. Currently,
some 2.3 million Californians are looking for work. In a December
interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Next 10 founder F. Noel
Perry admitted, "Green tech is not a panacea. We believe green jobs are
going to be a significant part of future jobs growth in California. But
at the same time, we know they are a small proportion of the total jobs
we have now."

Meanwhile, the AB 32 Implementation Group, a
coalition of California businesses concerned about the law's effect on
their competitiveness, commissioned a preliminary analysis of CARB's new
study from the consulting group T2 and Associates. The consulting group
is headed by Tom Tanton, a senior fellow at the libertarian Pacific
Research Institute. The T2 analysis estimates that AB 32 will reduce
California's gross state product by 2 percent (about $700 per person)
and result in a net loss of about 485,000 jobs by 2020.

The AB 32
Implementation Group wants to put an initiative on California's
November ballot that would delay the law's carbon rationing scheme until
California's unemployment rate drops below 5.5 percent. The measure was
originally called the California Jobs Initiative, but state Attorney
General Jerry Brown has given it a somewhat less catchy name: the
"Suspends Air Pollution Control Laws Requiring Major Polluters to Report
and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions That Cause Global Warming Until
Unemployment Drops Below Specified Level for Full Year" Initiative.
Supporters of carbon rationing point out that the initiative is backed
by out-of-state oil companies.

The initiative probably will get
on the ballot. Next 10 has released a poll that found a majority of
Californians still support AB 32, especially if the funds collected
through the cap-and-trade scheme are mostly rebated to state residents.
Support has eroded a bit, falling from 83 percent in 2007 to 69 percent
today; it remains to be seen how Californians will react once the
campaign against the 2012 implementation of carbon rationing takes off.
Already, the two leading Republican candidates for governor, former eBay
CEO Meg Whitman and state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, are
urging a go-slow approach to implementing AB 32. If economically
dispirited voters follow their lead, the prospects of Congress passing a
similar national carbon rationing plan this year will be bleak.

China
will build 20 large coal mines each with capacity of 10 million to 40
million tons by 2015, reports Shanghai Securities, citing He Youguo,
deputy director of the China Coal Industry Development Research Center.

According
to He, the coal output of large mines with production capacities of
more than 50 million tons will account for 65 percent of China's total
coal output by 2015.

The mining industry will focus on open pit
mines of 10 million tons during the 12th Five-Year Plan. The current
total output of open pit mines is 250 million tons.

Shares of Henan Shenhuo Coal Industry and Electricity Power (000933) dropped 3.71 percent to close at 16.09 yuan today.

Britain's Labour government shafted
Britain's huge finance industry with taxes and now the Tories are
shafting Britain's huge tourist industry by making it hard for people to
get to Britain

Is there any hope for Batty Britain? Those were the only two big industries that they were good at

In
a bold if lonely environmental stand, Britain's coalition government
has set out to curb the growth of what has been called "binge flying" by
refusing to build new runways around London to accommodate more planes.

Citing
the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation, Prime
Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, abruptly canceled longstanding
plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport in May, just days
after his election; he said he would also refuse to approve new runways
at Gatwick and Stansted, London's second-string airports.

The
government decided that enabling more flying was incompatible with
Britain's oft-stated goal of curbing emissions. Britons have become
accustomed to easy, frequent flying - jetting off to weekend homes in
Spain and bachelor parties in Prague - as England has become a hub for
low-cost airlines. The country's 2008 Climate Change Act requires it to
reduce emissions by at least 34 percent by 2020 from levels reached in
1990.

"The emissions were a significant factor" in the decision
to cancel the runway-building plans, Teresa Villiers, Britain's minister
of state for transport, said in an interview. "The 220,000 or so
flights that might well come with a third runway would make it difficult
to meet the targets we'd set for ourselves." She said that local
environmental concerns like noise and pollution around Heathrow also
weighed into the decision.

Britain is bucking a global trend.
Across North America, Asia and Europe, cities are building new runways
or expanding terminals to handle projected growth in air travel and air
freight in the hope of remaining competitive.

That growth in
traffic has been damped but not halted by hard economic times, and in
the current global recession, business concerns have generally prevailed
over worries about climate change. In the United States,
Chicago-O'Hare, Seattle-Tacoma and Washington-Dulles all opened new
runways in 2008.

On Tuesday, Kennedy International Airport in New
York reopened its Bay Runway - one of four, and the airport's longest -
after a four-month, $376 million renovation that included the creation
of two new taxiways to speed plane movements between runways and
terminals.

Airport expansion plans have sometimes been modified
or canceled because of concerns about noise or ground-level pollution.
But Peder Jensen, a transportation specialist at the European
Environment Agency in Copenhagen, said that as far as he knew, Britain
"is the only country that had made a conscious decision based on climate
considerations."

Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports
and a major connection point for destinations in Europe, South Asia and
the Middle East, is already notorious for its flight delays and endless
lines. It is the only airport of its size with just two runways;
Paris-Charles de Gaulle has four and O'Hare has seven.

So even
though the Conservative Party had been expressing growing reservations
about the planned expansion since 2008, many businessmen were shocked
when Mr. Cameron canceled the plan after coming to power in a coalition
with Liberal Democrats.

"This is a new government that claimed to
be business friendly, but their first move was to eliminate one of the
best growth opportunities for London and the U.K. and British
companies," said Steve Lott, a spokesman for the International Air
Transport Association. "We've run into a shortsighted political decision
that will have terrible economic consequences." ....

The
temptation to expand airports is great for cities in search of new
business and tourism. Airports in Europe are now mostly run by private
companies, and for them, the more traffic, the more profit.

Some
critics say the British government's principled stand is pointless
because airlines and travelers will respond not by forgoing air travel
but by flying through a different airport. Instead of emissions being
reduced, the critics say, they will simply be transferred to places like
Barajas Airport in Madrid or Frankfurt International Airport, which
have recently been expanded.

"My personal opinion is that the
decision concerning Heathrow's third runway was highly politicized and
outpaced the science of what that runway might or might not do in terms
of emissions," said Christopher Oswald, a vice president of Airports
Council International, an industry group. He suggested that a third
runway might actually reduce emissions above Heathrow, because with less
congestion, planes would spend less time idling on runways or circling
in holding patterns.

Having
watched the oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico, dairy farmer Frank
Konkel has a hard time seeing how spilled milk can be labeled the same
kind of environmental hazard.

But the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) is classifying milk as oil because it contains a percentage
of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil.

The Hesperia farmer
and others would be required to develop and implement spill prevention
plans for milk storage tanks. The rules are set to take effect in
November, though that date might be pushed back. "That could get
expensive quickly," Konkel said. "We have a serious problem in the Gulf.
Milk is a wholesome product that does not equate to spilling oil."

But
last week environmentalists disagreed at a Senate committee hearing on a
resolution from Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, calling for the EPA to
rescind its ruling. "The federal Clean Water Act requirements were
meant to protect the environment from petroleum-based oils, not milk,"
he said. "I think it is an example of federal government gone amuck."

But
Gayle Miller, legislative director of Sierra Club Michigan Chapter,
said agricultural pollution probably is the nation's most severe chronic
problem when it comes to water pollution. "Milk is wholesome in a
child's body. It is devastating in a waterway," Miller said. "The fact
that it's biodegradable is irrelevant if people die as a result of
cryptosporidium, beaches close for E. coli and fish are killed."

Miller
said "big agriculture" is constantly trying to be exempted from
environmental regulations at the state and federal level. She was
disappointed to learn the EPA told The Press it "expects shortly to
issue a notice to extend the date for milk storage tanks to comply with
SPCC (Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasure) regulations." Also,
the International Dairy Foods Association said it has learned the EPA
will exempt the industry from the rule.

But state lawmakers say
they won't let up until that is official.... In May, U.S. Rep. Candice
Miller, R-Mount Clemens, introduced legislation, co-sponsored by Rep.
Pete Hoekstra, R-Holland, that prohibits enforcement of the EPA's
regulations on dairy and dairy product producers, processors, handlers
and distributors.

"This is an example of where we have overreach
by the department that defies common sense," said Matt Smego,
legislative counsel for Michigan Farm Bureau.

Apparently
the "rockets' red glare" isn't "green" enough for some
environmentalists. Fourth of July fireworks displays have been deemed
"ecologically hazardous" by some eco-warriors, who are urging
environmentally-conscious Americans to shun the tradition.

"Fireworks
shows spray out a toxic concoction that rains down quietly into lakes,
rivers and bays throughout the country," wrote the Mother Nature
Network's Russell McLendon on June 30. "Many of the chemicals in
fireworks are also persistent in the environment, meaning they
stubbornly sit there instead of breaking down."

McLendon
suggested avoiding fireworks and finding other ways to celebrate
Independence Day. "The most eco-friendly alternative to fireworks is to
forgo explosions altogether - go to a parade, go fishing, grill out, or
help out," he wrote.

According to the writer, those stubborn
traditionalists who insist on seeing "the sky festively illuminated" can
always "try a laser light show" - which McLendon says is the
eco-friendly - albeit, lame - way to celebrate the Fourth.

The
Mother Nature Network is an environmental news service that covers "the
broadest scope of environmental and social responsibility issues on the
internet." It was founded in 2008 by Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck
Leavell. Its advisory board includes former Weather Channel star Heidi
Cullen and Barbara Pyle, the co-creator and producer of the eco-cartoon
"Captain Planet and the Planeteers."

But while McLendon's Mother
Nature article simply recommends that people opt out of fireworks
celebrations, one environmental group in California is taking a more
heavy-handed approach.

The Coastal Environmental Rights
Foundation is suing the city of La Jolla, CA to stop its fireworks
display, claiming that the Independence Day tradition is perilous to the
area's sensitive maritime resources.

"The entire shoreline in La
Jolla per the La Jolla community plan is a sensitive resource. It's
highly protected," Marco Gonzalez, an attorney for the Coastal
Environmental Rights Foundation, told News10. Gonzalez's group launched
its suit against the city on June 25.

According to the
organization's lawsuit, the city of La Jolla did not apply for a Coastal
Development permit or comply with the California Environmental Quality
Act, two steps the group says are legally necessary before the city can
host a fireworks display.

The foundation also alleged that the
ecological impacts of the Fourth of July show, including traffic and the
pollutants from firework debris entering the region's coastal
resources, have not been considered in an environmental review.

The
environmental group's suit will be heard on Wednesday, but another
organization called the La Jolla Community Fireworks Foundation says it
is battling to keep the annual city fireworks show going forward. "The
4th of July celebrates our country's freedoms, and we intend to
vigorously defend those freedoms here," said the La Jolla Community
Fireworks Foundation on its website.

The Fireworks advocacy group
insisted that the show will go on, in spite of the lawsuit. "The City
of San Diego has issued us the necessary permits to continue the
fireworks display and we intend to continue with the event," said the
statement on the organization's website.

Fireworks displays are
just the latest great American tradition to get caught in the
cross-hairs of the environmental "green" movement, joining the
long-despised hamburgers, SUVs, and indoor air conditioning.

No science please. We're alarmists (IPCC Promises Next Report Will Be More Alarmist)

The
review process for the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) has not
even started yet - but the IPCC's vice-chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
has already announced its likely outcome. No wonder people around the
world have lost trust in it

THE world's peak scientific body
on climate change will "almost inevitably" make a big increase in its
predictions of sea-level rises due to global warming in its next
landmark report in 2014, the vice-chair of the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change says.

That new data will be
considered in the IPCC's next assessment report - regarded by
governments and scientific groups as the world's pre-eminent scientific
document on climate change - and should lead to an increase in
predictions of sea-level rises, Professor van Ypersele said.

The
sea-level rises estimated in the IPCC's last assessment report, released
in 2007, were now on the low side. That report put sea-level rises at
18 to 59 centimetres above 1990 levels by 2100.

Members of the
IPCC met in Kuala Lumpur last week to discuss the consideration of the
Greenland and Antarctic data for the IPCC's next report - its fifth.
Analysis of the extent of reduction in mass of the two major ice sheets
will be the report's main focus.

"The reason there was a workshop
in KL is that the IPCC knows very well this is an area that needs
particular attention and where a lot of progress has been made,"
Professor van Ypersele said.

New satellite data "are starting to
show - but are quite convincing, I must say - that both the Greenland
ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet are losing net mass, not on the
margins but as an ice sheet, he said.

"These are new data, these
are new developments and new methods, which will allow the IPCC in its
developments around sea-level rises to provide numbers that will almost
inevitably be higher than the last assessment."

From
a broad sediment shelf at a water depth of 56 meters in the main basin
of Loch Sunart -- a fjord on the northwest coast of Scotland
(56°40.20'N, 05°52.22'W) -- the authors extracted several sediment cores
from which they developed a continuous record of various physical and
chemical properties of the sediment that spanned the last millennium and
extended all the way up to AD 2006. Of most interest to us, in this
regard, are the ?18O measurements made on the shells of the benthic
foraminifer Ammonia beccarii, because prior such data -- when operated
upon by the palaeotemperature equation of O'Neil et al. (1969) --
yielded bottom-water temperatures that had been judged by Cage and
Austin (2008) to be "the most realistic water temperature values for
infaunal benthic foraminifera from Loch Sunart."

What was learned

The
results of the two researchers' most recent efforts revealed that the
most distinctive feature of the Loch Sunart temperature record was an
abrupt warming at AD 1540 that led to a temperature anomaly of 1.1°C
above the long-term mean from AD 1540-1600, which period was preceded
within the interval AD 1445-1495 by some of the coldest temperatures of
the past 1000 years.

What it means

Noting that "the rate
and magnitude of the inferred warming at AD 1540 ... is similar to the
rate of change and magnitude observed during the late twentieth
century," Cage and Austin concluded that "changes in twentieth century
marine climate cannot yet be resolved from a background of natural
variability over the last millennium," which is another way of saying
that late 20th-century warming -- which has not further manifested
itself over the first decade of the 21st century -- was not unusual
enough to validly ascribe it to the concomitant increase in the air's
CO2 content.

Monday’s "Panorama" was the BBC’s most balanced look yet at the real ambiguities of climate science and policy

It
didn’t start well. Monday night’s edition of Panorama, entitled ‘What’s
Up With the Weather?’ aimed to examine British attitudes to climate
change and the state of the science in the wake of both ‘Climategate’
and the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change last
December. And that seemed to mean presenter Tom Heap sticking a carbon
dioxide detector into a car exhaust to prove it was helping to warm the
planet.

The programme did, however, get better. What was striking
about it was that the BBC, which has tended to be gung-ho in its
presentation of the dangers of global warming, actually presented those
who are sceptical of the orthodoxy in a reasonably fair way. In doing
so, it accepted that there is a genuine debate – and not some Big
Oil-funded attempt to pervert the course of environmental justice, as
some earlier BBC programmes have suggested. That debate is about what
has caused the moderate rise in temperature over the past 150 years, how
much warmer things will get, and what the best policy is to deal with a
changing world. In turn, this reflects (hopefully) a more rational turn
in the politics of climate change.

One thing that became very
clear was how much agreement there is between ‘sceptics’ (also known as
‘deniers’ in too much of the discussion about climate in recent years)
and those holding a mainstream view. Well-known US climate scientist
John Christy from the University of Alabama and Danish ‘Skeptical
Environmentalist’ Bjørn Lomborg broadly agreed with Bob Watson, former
head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Bob
Ward, from the Grantham Research Institute of Climate Change (both of
whom have been vitriolic in their attacks on sceptics in the past) on
the basic science of global warming:

* the world has got warmer over the past 150 years

* carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas

* human activity has emitted a lot of additional carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere

* this human activity is to some extent responsible for global warming

The
differences of opinion come when we get to the issue of how much
influence all those cars, planes, factories and farms have on the
temperature and what it means for the future. Christy believes that the
human influence is fairly small – about ‘a quarter’ of the current
warming, he guesses. Watson and Ward believe that most of the recent
warming has been due to humans and that this means markedly increased
temperatures, with potentially disastrous consequences, if we do not
decarbonise the economy. Lomborg is far from being a sceptic on climate
science; he is really critical of the policy response rather than the
IPCC’s estimates for future temperature. He believes that cutting carbon
emissions drastically and quickly would be far too expensive and that
what we need is a mix of research into low-carbon energy sources and a
degree of adaptation to a warmer world.

What seems to have slowly
dawned on those banging the drum for radical action on climate change
is that the attempt to panic the population into accepting drastic cuts
in living standards to counter rising temperatures has failed. Instead,
this approach has merely confirmed for many people that the whole thing
is a green conspiracy. In the programme, Heap talked to one ordinary
couple about their attitudes to climate change. While the wife was
convinced it was a major problem, the husband thought it was just a
scare story. But this sharp difference of opinion soon collapsed when it
came to the costs of switching to a low-carbon economy. While the
orthodox approach to climate change would involve increasing the cost of
energy (and therefore, pretty much everything else), this couple – like
most others, one suspects – was concerned that energy prices were
already too high.

Former IPCC boss Bob Watson suggested to Heap
that we should be prepared to pay to insure against future warming, just
as we insure against a fire in our homes. That sounds fair enough. But
the price of the insurance is important here. Insurance only makes sense
if the cost is small, yet some of the proposals for cutting emissions
sound positively ruinous.

Another side to the programme was the
discussion of what Climategate – the release of previously private
emails and data last year from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the
University of East Anglia – really told us about the science. The
importance of the material contained in this disclosure has sometimes
been overstated by many critics of the climate orthodoxy, alleging a
conspiracy between researchers to massage data and suppress dissent.
While some of what is discussed in the CRU emails sails close to that,
it ignores the real problem: the wider environment in which the climate
debate has taken place.

The real driver of the climate change
scare has been the political demand for certainty, a Great Moral Truth
that society can be organised around. The genuine ambiguities of the
science and the policy options have been obliterated – something that
the BBC itself has been serially guilty of. If critics of the orthodoxy
push the idea of a ‘conspiracy’ too much, this may divert attention from
the real lesson of Climategate: that this climate change business is
all just a lot more complicated than many have been prepared to admit
and pressing the panic button right now would be a very stupid idea.

This
became all too apparent at the Copenhagen summit. For all the talk
about huge emissions cuts, there was an enormous degree of bad faith at
work. No credible politician was really going to commit to the policies
that might produce rapid decarbonisation of the economy, least of all
leaders of rapidly developing countries who need all the energy –
‘dirty’ or ‘clean’ – they can get. (The fact that the UK parliament
passed a law last year committing the country to such drastic emissions
cuts says much about the state of political life here.) The Kyoto-style,
targets-driven policy for international cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions has been an expensive failure.

A new approach is
required that takes a more grown-up approach to climate change, one that
is based on dealing with a potential practical problem of rising
temperatures rather than an existential crisis that demands the
wholesale impoverishment of society in the name of ‘the planet’. Let’s
keep working on the science, without any preconceptions of what the
outcome will be. Let’s work on new energy technologies because we’ll
need lots more power in the future. Let’s see what rising temperatures
might mean and how we can best adapt to them, or even use them to our
advantage. Let’s cut out the moralism and the name-calling.

A
good place to start will be in the public debate about climate change.
While Monday’s Panorama was by no means perfect, let’s hope it is a
small milestone on the road to a more mature discussion of global
warming.

Tests
on shoppers' bags revealed that half contained traces of the lethal
toxin E.coli, which killed 26 people in Scotland in 1996 in one of the
world's worst food-poisoning outbreaks. The scientists also found many
bags were contaminated with salmonella. They say reusable bags must be
washed regularly at high temperature to kill bugs left by the packaging
from raw meat.

The level of bacteria they found was high enough
to 'cause a wide range of serious health problems and even death',
particularly to children. The tests were carried out by experts at the
University of Arizona, who stopped 84 shoppers to check the state of
their bags.

The popularity of reusable 'eco-friendly' bags has
soared in Britain as the growth in recycling means fewer consumers use
disposable plastic bags.

But experts fear unwashed bags could
pose a health threat. Professor Charles Gerba, who led the study,
said: 'Our findings suggest a serious threat to public health,
especially from bacteria such as E.coli. 'Consumers are alarmingly
unaware of these risks and the critical need to sanitise their bags
weekly.'

Petrol
[gasoline] and power prices have risen sharply in New Zealand after the
government introduced a controversial emissions trading scheme.

The
government has pressed ahead with plans to slash the nation's carbon
output, despite widespread opposition and New Zealand's larger neighbour
Australia shelving its own scheme.

Motorists were hit by a 3c
(1.4p) rise in the price of a litre of petrol overnight, while
householders face a 5 per cent increase in gas and electricity prices.
It was the first step in a complex scheme, universally referred to as
"the ETS", to slash carbon emissions back to 1990 levels.

Some
disgruntled consumers marked the launch by wearing T-shirts with the
meaning of the letters changed to read "Extra Tax Sucks".

Businesses
facing cost increases have warned they will be forced to raise prices
of everyday items, such as the bread on supermarket shelves.

Under
the scheme, to be fully phased in over several years, companies trade
carbon credits known as New Zealand Units (NZUs). Industries that are
net creators of carbon must buy the units from the government or from
sellers whose businesses absorb carbon, such as those that plant trees.
The units can be traded internationally with other countries
implementing a similar scheme under the Kyoto Protocol.

Energy-saving
lightbulbs could treble in price as ministers order energy suppliers to
stop subsidising them. At the moment, power companies discount compact
fluorescent bulbs as part of measures to meet greenhouse gas targets.
But Chris Huhne, minister for climate change, has told electricity and
gas firms to stop the promotions in supermarkets and DIY chains - and
invest more money in home insulation instead.

Some industry experts have welcomed the change. But others warn that these rules will lead to price rises.

Energy-saving bulbs are sold for as little as 33p each in supermarkets. The end of subsidises means they could cost £1 or more.

Under
the Government's Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, the biggest energy
supplies must help customers cut their fuel bills and reduce greenhouse
gas emissions.

The companies have met their targets by promoting
energy-saving bulbs - and have given away around 230 million in the
last few years.

At the start of last year, ministers banned light
bulb mail-outs. But power companies have continued subsidise the cost
of bulbs in supermarkets and DIY stores.

In the last three months
alone, eight million of the bulbs were sold by chain stores under the
subsidy scheme. But these subsidises will be scrapped when the CERT
scheme is extended from March 2011 to the end of 2012, Mr Huhne
explained.

Suppliers will be forced to spend the money promoting
loft, cavity wall and solid wall insulation instead. Most householders
could save around £550 a year by insulating their homes, the minister
added. 'This is the beginning of a massive and urgent increase in home
energy insulation for the nation. 'We are demanding that energy
companies work harder to make homes warmer, more environmentally
friendly and cheaper to run, especially for those who need it most.'

The Government says 3.5million more homes will benefit from insulation under the scheme.

Under the CERT scheme, cheaper compact fluorescent bulbs were only available from large retailers.

James
Shortridge, owner of the independent lighting store Ryness, said:
'There will be a rise in price for the bulbs in the supermarkets, unless
they decide to carry on subsidising them anyway.'

Which? chief
executive, Peter Vicary-Smith said: 'We're pleased that energy suppliers
will no-longer be able to treat CERT as a box-ticking exercise by
sending out millions of light bulbs. 'This proposal should ensure that
more households can access effective energy- saving measures like loft
insulation.'

Look at the raw
data (jagged blue line) in the second graph below and what you see is
essentially a picture of random fluctuations. Amid such large
fluctuations, a tiny overall trend is meaningless. And if
industrialization has caused what warming there is, how come
temperatures were so high in the early decades of the 20th century?
Most people rode horses in that era

Retired
school principal Kenskingdom was alarmed by this Bureau of Meterology
graph, showing a strong warming trend for Victoria:

He
checked the data from which the trend, and found it had first been
adjusted and turned into “high quality” data. As a BOM spokesman assured
him:

On the issue of adjustments you find that these
have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these
tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would
be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).

Kenskingdom goes through the individual stations for you and concludes:

There
is a distinct warming trend in Victoria since the 1960s, which has been
especially marked in the last 15 years. The first half of the record
shows a cooling trend. BOM’s adjustments have attempted to remove
this. 2007, not 2009, was the warmest year in the past 100 years.

Three
stations identified as urban in 1996 have been included. Many
stations’ data have been arbitrarily adjusted to cool earlier years.
Only one station has had its trend reduced. Two are essentially
unchanged. Ten of Victoria’s 13 stations have been adjusted to increase
the warming trend, to the extent that there is a warming bias of at
least 133%, more likely 143%.

These adjustments, and the Australian temperature record to which they contribute, are plainly not to be trusted.

An American university study of solar ovens has produced a surprising result: a challenge to the global warming theory.

Brigham Young University (BYU) Professor Steven E. Jones of the
Department of Physics and Astronomy and his student, Jenni Christensen
Currit, have conducted experiments that prove that solar ovens are not
just a cheap and reliable way of ‘free energy’ cooking but are also
useful tools for disputing theories that the planet is in danger of any
runaway catastrophic warming due to fossil fuel emissions.

Their study entitled, ‘Solar Cookers for Developing Countries’ shows
that the predicted harmful back radiation effect defined by the
greenhouse gas theory (GHG), whereby carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is
supposedly responsible for re-radiating heat energy (repeatedly up and
down as if under a blanket) doesn’t exist in the real world.

The finding challenges the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and
certain world governments who have premised trillion-dollar
cap-and-trade tax policies on fears that catastrophic global warming may
ensue if levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to rise.

Cooling or Warming: Ovens Satisfy Laws of Thermodynamics

Remarkably, the researchers tested solar ovens not just as cookers
but also for their potential to cool food and water both day and night.
All solar cookers tested proved highly successful at cooling both day
and night as long as they were carefully aimed.

The paper
explains, "If at night the temperature was within 6 °C or 10°F of
freezing, nighttime cooling could be used to create ice. Previous tests
at BYU (in the autumn and with less water) achieved ice formation by 8
a.m. when the minimum ambient night-time temperature was about 48 °F."

Brigham Young proved that solar ovens will produce ice when the
ambient air temp is +6 deg C. Currit reports that this occurs when solar
cookers are, "aimed away from buildings, and trees.”

It is
proof of a cooling effect that appears to contradict the so-called
re-radiation properties of carbon dioxide; if CO2 does cause warming it
isn’t showing up in these tests. This is because if back radiation was
actually reaching the Earth, solar ovens would produce heating at night.
But clearly they are not. The findings are set to become a hot topic in
the ongoing global warming debate.

The report finds that
cooling must be occurring, “ because all bodies emit thermal radiation
by virtue of their temperature. So the heat should be radiated outward.”
This is in accordance, says the study, with, “ the second law of
thermodynamics which states that heat will flow naturally from a hot
object to a cold object.”

Less Cooling Noted During Day Time

However, it was found there existed a discrepancy between the night time and daytime effectiveness of oven cooling.

Currit explains why; “One possible reason that daytime cooling was
not greater has to do with the different types of solar radiation. There
are two kinds of solar radiation; direct and diffuse. Direct radiation
is the portion of light that appears to come straight from the Sun. Only
direct radiation can be focused. Diffuse radiation is sunlight that
appears to come from all over the sky.”

Thereby, indirect
atmospheric radiation is so weak that the so-called intensifying
‘greenhouse effect’ cannot practically occur in the real world. This
accord with the Stephan-Boltzmann Law that affirms "Objects that absorb
energy will increase in temperature and radiate all the energy it
absorbed"

Most likely, our planet has successfully operated
this cooling mechanism for billions of years. Thus, it is more
conceivable that atmospheric gases are nature’s coolants.

No Evidence of any Back Radiation Effect

It is this failure by the BYU test thermometers to detect any
warming effect that suggests so-called back radiation from CO2 isn’t
happening, contrary to the predictions of government climatologists.

It was this feared back-radiation effect that certain western
governments had predicted was the greatest danger for our planet's
future. Alongside the mainstream media, politicians have touted runaway
global warming as a consequence of further human emissions of GHG. The
solution proposed by environmental lobbyists was to levy taxes to help
cut fossil fuel emissions from increased worldwide industrial production
and our modern way of living.

But without evidence of
physically provable back-radiation the greenhouse effect appears to be
in question, and the need for tax hikes is likewise questionable.

Tombstone Evidence Supports University Results

But there is more evidence to support the Brigham Young findings and
its data coming from weather station evidence at Tombstone, in the
desert of southern Arizona, southeast of Tucson where NOAA has moved its
measuring apparatus in 1970.

The year is significant, as
explained below, because it allows us to observe the difference of this
station’s historical temperature record by observing the effects made on
it between the older and newer sites and pre- and post-1970.

The date 1970 matters because IPCC climate models only require the
addition of anthropogenic CO2 after 1970 – prior to that the warming is
explained with natural forcings.

Thus, if the greenhouse gas
theory holds true then the effect of increasing CO2 as a greenhouse gas
in the desert should be most noticeable at night when the Earth is
radiating heat.

But if we compare graphs found here of the
station data for pre- and post-1970 it tells us, contrary to
predictions, that there has been no warming in the Tombstone minimum
temperature during the “CO2 era”.

Greenhouse Gas Skeptics Vindicated

Theorists skeptical of the GHG theory argue that such evidence shows
that greenhouse gases have no obvious and measurable impact on
temperatures. They say the sky and upper atmosphere will always be at a
lower temperature so that heat will, in turn, always be readily
transferred away from the warmer ground (and solar oven) to the cooler
sky, which possesses an average high-atmosphere temperature of
approximately -20 °C.

A growing number of scientists are
critical of the GHG theory, most notably recently have been Dr. Richard
F. Yanda, Alan Siddons and Heinz Thieme. While over 130 German
scientists have declared that global warming has become a “pseudo
religion” and rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures.
Siddons believes the GHG theory is disproved because, " Re-radiated
energy is neither reflected nor absorbed by a surface."

Thus
the Brigham Young experiments have inadvertently added weight to the
debate proving that any heat created, just like the cooking vessel, will
always be radiated from Earth to the outer atmosphere and then to space
because of this unique cooling property of ‘greenhouse’ gases.

I
have just finished reading an excellent article by Alan Siddons called
The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory on American Thinker from way back
on 25 February 2010. The article is a little slow in developing, but
finishes with a death blow to the usual theory put forth by catastrophic
anthropogenic global warming advocates. I intend to explain more
concisely what Siddons explained and to add comments of my own in this
post which make the deathblow much more gory.

First of all, I am
going to enlarge the context of the discussion. The primary source of
heat for the surface of the Earth is the radiant energy of the sun. The
solar wind of the sun, materials dumped into the atmosphere from space,
heat from the deep interior of the earth, and the interplay of changes
in the Earth's magnetic field and the sun's magnetic field are also
contributors of heat, though the sum of these is much less than that
from the sun's radiant energy spectrum of ultraviolet (UV), visible, and
infra-red (IR) light. The entire catastrophic greenhouse gas
hypothesis ignores effects upon the incident IR portion of this spectrum
of light from the sun. This is foolish.

UV light is 11% of the
radiant energy from the sun. The UV light variance of 0.5 to 0.8% with
the solar cycle is much larger than is the visible light variance of
0.22%. UV light is absorbed throughout the atmosphere, but much still
reaches the ground and is absorbed there. The amount of UV radiation
absorbed in the upper atmosphere is highly dependent upon the amount of
ozone there. The amount of ozone is said variously to be dependent upon
the solar wind, CFCs, water vapor, and volcanic activity. When UV
light is more absorbed in the stratosphere than the ground, its surface
warming effect is diminished. The absorbed energy is re-emitted as IR
radiation and much of that energy is quickly lost to space.

The
entire atmosphere is transparent to visible light which is the form of
44% of the radiant energy from the sun, so aside from reflection from
clouds and aerosol particles, the visible light reaches the ground or
oceans and warms them near their surfaces.

Finally, the IR
radiation is not absorbed by nitrogen, oxygen, and argon gases which
make up 99% of the atmosphere, so a large fraction of it directly warms
the Earth's surface. Some, is absorbed by the dominant greenhouse gas,
water vapor, and small amounts are absorbed by carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases. The incoming IR radiation absorbed in the atmosphere
is less effective in warming the Earth's surface than is that which is
absorbed by the Earth's surface directly. This is because some this
energy absorbed in the atmosphere then is radiated again in the form of
IR radiation, but now half or more of that is directed out to space. In
other words, more water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere results in a
less effective warming of the surface than does less of these gases with
respect to the incoming IR energy from the sun. The greenhouse gases
have a cooling effect on the original solar radiance spectrum for the
45% of the solar energy in the form of IR.

In each case, whether
UV, visible light, or IR, not all of the radiation of that form striking
the Earth's surface is absorbed. Some fraction is reflected and the
fraction is very dependent on whether the ground is covered with snow,
plowed earth, grasses, forests, crops, black top, or water. There are
two real ways that man does have some effect on the Earth's temperature.
He changes the surface of the earth over a fraction of the 30% of its
surface which is land. He also converts fossil and biomass fuels into
heat. Compared to the overall natural effects, these man-made effects
are small, yet they are probably large compared to the effect of his
adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.

Wherever the atmosphere
is heated, there is transfer of heat. In the outer, very low density
atmosphere, the primary means of heat transfer is radiant transfer by IR
emission from an energetic molecule or atom, since collisions of
molecules and atoms for direct energy transfer are rare. In the denser
atmosphere, most energy transfer is due to collisions and the convective
flow of masses of warmed air. Near the Earth's surface, almost all of
the energy lost by the warmed surface is due to gas molecules striking
the surface and picking up heat and then colliding with other molecules
to transfer heat from one to another. Once a body of air is so heated,
then masses of warmed molecules are transported upward into the cooler
atmosphere at higher altitudes or laterally toward cooler surface areas
by convection. Any warmed molecule, most of which are nitrogen, oxygen,
and argon will radiate IR radiation. However, no molecule or atom at a
low temperature such as that near the Earth's surface is a very
effective energy radiator, since the Stephan-Boltzmann equation depends
upon the fourth power of the absolute temperature, which commonly near
the Earth's surface is about 290K. Thus, gas molecule collisions and
convection are the very dominant means of heat transfer. These
processes on balance cool the surface of the Earth and redistribute some
of the heat back into the upper atmosphere and cooler places such as
those shaded from the sun or the arctic regions.

The favorite
claim of the catastrophic greenhouse gas global warming people is that
an increase of carbon dioxide and methane gas in the atmosphere will
cause energy radiated into the atmosphere from the ground to be absorbed
by these molecules and they will radiate half of it back toward the
ground, where that energy will warm the surface again and reduce the
cooling due to the ground originally radiating that heat into the
atmosphere. According to Alan Siddons, less than 1% of the cooling of
the Earth's surface is due to IR emission of the surface or the gases
near the surface. More than 99% is due to direct contact and convection
according to Siddons. Ian Tulloch informs me that at night the IR
cooling may increase to as much as 20%, so future improvements may
require a more informed average value. For the moment, let us consider
an average value of about 10% to be more conservative.

Since the
dominant source of energy warming the surface of the Earth is the sun,
let us do a simple calculation based upon the facts presented above.
Let us say that greenhouse gases absorb a fraction f of the incoming IR
radiation from the sun, which is 45% of the sun's incoming energy. Thus
the energy absorbed by greenhouse gases from the incoming spectrum of
solar energy is 0.45f and a fraction of this, say k is radiated back
into space without coming near the surface. NASA says k is 0.5, but it
is actually slightly larger than that given that much of this absorption
occurs at appreciable altitudes. The total cooling due to greenhouse
gases, somewhere in the atmosphere, is now 0.45fk. Of this energy, had
it become incident upon the surface as IR radiation, a part would have
been reflected rather than absorbed. The fraction that would have been
absorbed at the surface if it had not been absorbed by IR-absorbing
gases is q. The net energy then lost to the warming of the surface is
then 0.45fkq.

Now, let us suppose that a fraction g of the total
energy from the sun is absorbed in the Earth's surface or in the very
lower part of the atmosphere. We know that g is a larger fraction of 1
than is f, since most of the solar radiation does reach the ground,
including that part in the IR part of the spectrum. Of the energy g
absorbed in the surface, only 0.01 times it is emitted as IR radiation
according to Siddons, but to be conservative as discussed above, let us
be generous and peg this at an average value of 0.1. Since the
greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere is unchanged the amount of
outgoing radiation, serving to cool the surface, is now 0.1gf. A
fraction j of this energy will be emitted by the IR warmed greenhouse
gas molecules back toward the ground. NASA has said this fraction is
0.5. Let us then say j is about 0.5. The greenhouse gas warming of the
surface due to absorbing IR radiation from the ground would then be
about 0.05gfq, where q is the fraction of back-reflected IR radiation
that was incident upon the surface and absorbed. Remember that some
radiation is reflected.

There is another term for the IR
radiation which is reflected from the surface without having been
absorbed in the surface. The fraction of the incoming IR radiation
reflected from the surface is (1-q) and the fraction of the total
incoming energy from the sun that was initially IR radiation was 0.45.
The total of initial incoming solar radiation reflected from the surface
is then 0.45(1-q). Of this outgoing reflected IR radiation, a fraction
f is absorbed by IR-absorbing gases as was the case of initial incoming
IR radiation from the sun. Of the gas-absorbed IR radiation reflected
from the surface, half is re-emitted toward the surface and a fraction q
of that is absorbed by the surface. The result is that this reflected
IR contribution to warming the atmosphere closer to the surface is
0.225(1-q)fq.

Now we will compare the greenhouse gas cooling
effect upon the incoming solar radiation of 0.45fkq to the re-warming of
the surface due to 0.005gfq times the total solar radiant energy and
the reflected IR contribution of energy re-directed to the surface from
IR-absorbing gases. The ratio of the warming terms to the cooling term
is:

(0.05gfq + 0.225(1-q)fq) / 0.45fkq

= 0.11g/k + 0.5(1-q)/k

Now let us consider the approximate size of these terms.

* k is slightly more than 0.5, while g is the surface absorptivity
for the entire solar spectrum and is likely to be between 0.7 and 0.9,
so 0.11g/k is about 0.07.

* q is likely to be nearly equal to
the total solar absorption fraction at the ground, though it is
specifically the IR ground absorption fraction. (1-q) is surely less
than 0.5 and is likely to be about 0.2. Taking k equal to 0.5,
0.5(1-q)/k is about 0.2

* Thus the net warming effect of
greenhouse gases is smaller than the cooling effect, since surface
heating is about 0.07 + 0.2 = 0.27 times the greenhouse cooling effect
in the atmosphere, mostly removed from effect transfer of energy to the
ground.

In sum, using a simple calculation we can approximate the
effect of greenhouse gases on the surface temperature of the Earth. It
turns out that the cooling effect due to keeping incoming solar IR
radiation away from the surface is about 3.7 times the re-heating effect
due to so-called greenhouse gases. Now, if the effect were very large
in either case, this might be cause for concern. We would likely be
better off heating the surface of the planet than cooling it. But, then
we are heating with land use changes and the release of energy from
fossil fuels, so the generation of cooling CO2 may simply be
compensating for these other small effects. Another cooling effect is
particulates and aerosols. Much more important to this issue than CO2
and methane IR-absorbing gases is water vapor in any case. So, most of
this net cooling effect is due to water vapor and only a small part is
due to CO2 and methane.

Now, of course so much is going on here
that this calculation is but an indicator of the likely net effect of
greenhouse gases. A more careful calculation would consider the
different weight of IR frequencies in the original spectrum of the sun
and in the Earth surface emission spectrum. But, any changes due to
these secondary issues are likely to be small. In any case, this
calculation makes mincemeat of the usual simple rationale for greenhouse
gas warming alarmism which fails to consider a number of aspects of
this simple calculation.

It is insane to focus only on the
outgoing IR radiation due to light absorbed in the Earth's surface while
ignoring the large part of the sun's total incident radiation which is
IR from the get-go. It is also insane to ignore gas collisions and
convection currents as mechanisms for heat transfer. The fact that IR
absorbed from the incoming solar spectrum occurs higher in the
atmosphere and the energy cannot be as effectively transported to the
lower atmosphere or even worse to the ground is very important. But,
convection and gas molecular collisions can take the energy of the
ground and transport it to higher altitudes to replace air cooled by
radiating IR energy out into space. This means that the most important
warming effect on the surface is that radiation absorbed by the surface
upon the incidence of the radiation. Additions of IR-absorbing gases
just mean that more energy of the solar spectrum is deposited somewhere
in the atmosphere rather than in the ground. This results in a net cooling effect.

I
have sometimes used the greenhouse gas term in the presently
conventional way, but in reality, all gases when warm radiate IR energy
and as pointed out by Alan Siddons, they are all really greenhouse
gases. But, here I used the term only for those gases that absorb IR
energy.

Once
again, the world is being warned of a climate “tipping point.” The
latest bout of stern warnings comes from a survey of 14 climate
"experts."

Get ready, we only have 190 years! Scientists 'expect
climate tipping point' by 2200 - UK Independent - June 28, 2010 -
Excerpt: "13 of the 14 experts said that the probability of reaching a
tipping point (by 2200) was greater than 50 per cent, and 10 said that
the chances were 75 per cent or more."

Such silliness. It's
difficult to keep up whether it is hours, days, months or 1000 years.
Here are few recent examples of others predicting climate "tipping
points" of various durations.

HOURS: Flashback March 2009: 'We have hours' to prevent climate disaster -- Declares Elizabeth May of Canadian Green Party

Millennium:
Flashback June 2010: 1000 years delay: Green Guru James Lovelock:
Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have
1,000 years to sort it out'

It is becoming obvious that the only authentic climate "tipping point" we can rely is this one:

Flashback
2007: New Zealand Scientist on Global Warming: 'It's All Going to be a
Joke in 5 Years' (He wasn't Optimistic enough -- it only took 3 years!)

Inconvenient History of Climate 'Tipping Point' Warnings

As
early as 1989, the UN was already trying to sell their “tipping point”
rhetoric on the public. See: U.N. Warning of 10-Year 'Climate Tipping
Point' Began in 1989 – Excerpt: According to July 5, 1989, article in
the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United
Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year
window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the 1989
article, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could
be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global
warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and
crop failures would create an exodus of 'eco-refugees,' threatening
political chaos.” (LINK) & (LINK)

NASA scientist James Hansen
has been warning of a “tipping point” for years now. See: Earth's
Climate Approaches Dangerous Tipping Point – June 1, 2007 – Excerpt: A
stern warning that global warming is nearing an irreversible tipping
point was issued today” by James Hansen.

Former Vice President Al
Gore invented his own “tipping point” clock a few years ago. Excerpt:
Former Vice-President Al Gore came to Washington on July 17, 2008, to
deliver yet another speech warning of the “climate crisis.” “The leading
experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic
changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever
recover from this environmental crisis,” Gore stated.

Prince
Charles claimed a 96-month tipping point in July 2009. Excerpt: The heir
to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists
at St James's Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just
96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on
capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and
that the "age of convenience" was over.

'World has only ten years to control global warming, warns Met Office - UK Telegraph – November 15, 2009

Excerpt:
Pollution needs to be brought under control within ten years to stop
runaway climate change, according to the latest Met Office predictions.
[...] "To limit global mean temperature [increases] to below 2C, implied
emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere at the end of the century fall close
to zero in most cases."

The UN chief Ban Ki-moon further
shortened the "tipping point" in August 2009, when he warned of
'incalculable' suffering without climate deal in December 2009!

Newsweek
magazine waded into the tipping point claims as well. Newsweek wrote:
"The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to
cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." But,
Newsweek's "tipping point" quote appeared in a April 28, 1975 article
about global cooling! Same rhetoric, different eco-scare.

Looking back, it turns out that a lot of scientific consensuses were wrong.

One consensus that lasted over 100 years is that stomach ulcers could
not be caused by bacterial infection because the stomach was too acid
for bacteria to live there. They underestimated Helicobacter pylori.
For years, lots of people had drastic surgery for no good reason.
Ulcers are now normally treated by antibiotics -- JR

Last week, the prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, published an article that tried to assess
the relative credibility of climate scientists who “support the tenets
of anthropogenic climate change” versus those who do not. One goal of
the study is to “provide an independent assessment of level of
scientific consensus concerning anthropogenic climate change.” The
researchers found that 97–98 percent of the climate researchers most
actively publishing in the field are convinced of man-made climate
change.

In addition, using publication and citation data, the
study found that the few climate change dissenters are far less
scientifically prominent than convinced researchers. The article
concludes, “This extensive analysis of the mainstream versus
skeptical/contrarian researchers suggests a strong role for considering
expert credibility in the relative weight of and attention to these
groups of researchers in future discussions in media, policy, and public
forums regarding anthropogenic climate change.” Translation: reporters,
politicians, and citizens should stop listening to climate change
skeptics.

Naturally, there has been some pushback against the
article. For example, Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist
Judith Curry who was not pigeonholed in the study told ScienceInsider,
“This is a completely unconvincing analysis.” One of the chief
objections to the findings is that peer review is stacked in favor of
the consensus view, locking skeptics out of publishing in major
scientific journals. John Christy, a prominent climate change researcher
at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is skeptical of
catastrophic claims, asserted that because of “the tight interdependency
between funding, reviewers, popularity. ... We [skeptical researchers]
are being ‘black‑listed,’ as best I can tell, by our colleagues.”

This
fight over credibility prompted me to wonder about the role that the
concept of a “scientific consensus” has played out in earlier policy
debates. We all surely want our decisions to be guided by the best
possible information. Consider the overwhelming consensus among
researchers that biotech crops are safe for humans and the environment—a
conclusion that is rejected by the very environmentalist organizations
that loudly insist on the policy relevance of the scientific consensus
on global warming. But I digress.

Taking a lead from the PNAS
researchers I decided to mine the “literature” on the history of uses of
the phrase “scientific consensus.” I restricted my research to Nexis
searches of major world publications, figuring that’s where mainstream
views would be best represented. So how has the phrase “scientific
consensus” been used in past policy debates?

My Nexis search
found that 36 articles using that phrase appeared in major world
publications prior to my arbitrary June 1985 search cutoff. One of the
first instances of the uses of the phrase appears in the July 1, 1979
issue of The Washington Post on the safety of the artificial sweetener
saccharin. “The real issue raised by saccharin is not whether it causes
cancer (there is now a broad scientific consensus that it does)”
(parenthetical in original) reported the Post. The sweetener was listed
in 1981 in the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s Report on Carcinogens
as a substance reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.

Interesting.
Thirty years later, the National Cancer Institute reports that “there
is no clear evidence that saccharin causes cancer in humans.” In light
of this new scientific consensus, the sweetener was delisted as a
probable carcinogen in 2000.

Similarly, the Post reported later
that same year (October 6, 1979) a “profound shift” in the prevailing
scientific consensus about the causes of cancer. According to the Post,
researchers in the 1960s believed that most cancers were caused by
viruses, but now diet was considered the far more important factor. One
of the more important findings was that increased dietary fiber appeared
to reduce significantly the incidence of colon cancer.

Twenty
years later, a major prospective study of nearly 90,000 women reported,
“No significant association between fiber intake and the risk of
colorectal adenoma was found.” In 2005, another big study confirmed that
“high dietary fiber intake was not associated with a reduced risk of
colorectal cancer.” While dietary fiber may not prevent colon cancer, it
is associated with lower cardiovascular risk.

In its June 1,
1984 issue, The Washington Post reported the issuance of a massive new
report by the White House science office supporting the scientific
consensus that “agents found to cause cancer in animals should be
considered ‘suspect human carcinogens,’” and that “giving animals high
doses of an agent is a proper way to test its carcinogenicity.” Although
such studies remain a regulatory benchmark, at least some researchers
question the usefulness of such tests today.

The December 17,
1979 issue of Newsweek reported that the Department of Energy was
boosting research spending on fusion energy reactors based on a
scientific consensus that the break-even point—that a fusion reactor
would produce more energy than it consumes—could be passed within five
years. That hasn’t happened yet and the latest effort to spark a fusion
energy revolution, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor,
will not be ready for full-scale testing until 2026.

An article
in the June 8, 1981 issue of The Washington Post cited a spokesman for
the American Medical Association opposing proposed federal legislation
that would make abortion murder as saying, "The legislation is founded
on the idea that a scientific consensus exists that life begins at the
time of conception. We will go up there to say that no such consensus
exists." It still doesn’t.

In the years prior to 1985, several
publications reported the scientific consensus that acid rain emitted by
coal-fired electricity generation plants belching sulfur dioxide was
destroying vast swathes of forests and lakes in the eastern United
States. For example, the March 10, 1985 New York Times cited
environmental lawyer Richard Ottinger, who asserted that there is a
“broad scientific consensus" that acid rain is destroying lakes and
forests and "is a threat to our health."

In 1991, after 10 years
and $500 million, the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program
study (as far as I can tell that report is oddly missing from the web)
actually reported, according to a 1992 article in Reason: “The
assessment concluded that acid rain was not damaging forests, did not
hurt crops, and caused no measurable health problems. The report also
concluded that acid rain helped acidify only a fraction of Northeastern
lakes and that the number of acid lakes had not increased since 1980.”
Nevertheless, Congress passed the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments that
regulate sulfur dioxide emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme. Acid
rain was clearly causing some problems, but was not the wide-scale
environmental disaster that had been feared.

Interestingly, the
only mention of a scientific consensus with regard to stratospheric
ozone depletion by ubiquitous chlorofluorocarbon (CFCs) refrigerants was
an article in the October 6, 1982 issue of the industry journal
Chemical Week. That article noted that the National Research Council had
just issued a report that had cut estimates of ozone depletion in half
from a 1979 NRC report. The 1982 NRC report noted, “Current scientific
understanding…indicates that if the production of two CFCs …were to
continue into the future at the rate prevalent in 1977 the steady state
reduction in total global ozone…could be between 5 and 9 percent.” Such a
reduction might have been marginally harmful, but not catastrophic. It
was not until 1986 that the mainstream press reported the discovery of
the “ozone hole” over Antarctica. This discovery quickly led to the
adoption of an international treaty aiming to drastically reduce the
global production of CFCs in 1987. (For what it is worth, I supported
the international ban of CFCs in my 1993 book Eco-Scam.)

With
regard to anthropogenic climate change, my Nexis search of major world
publications finds before 1985 just a single 1981 New York Times
article. “There has been a growing scientific consensus that the buildup
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is creating a ‘greenhouse effect’
by trapping some of the earth's heat and warming the atmosphere,”
reported the Times in its January 14, 1981 issue.

What a
difference the passage of 25 years makes. My Nexis search turned up 457
articles in major publications that in the last year cited or used the
phrase “scientific consensus.” Checking to see how many combined that
phrase with “climate change,” Nexis reported that the number comes to
342 articles. Briefly scanning through a selection of the articles it is
clear that some of them involved the controversy over whether or not
there is a “scientific consensus” on climate change. The majority appear
to cite various experts and policymakers asserting the existence of a
scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is dangerous to
humanity.

So what to make of this increase in the use of the
concept of “scientific consensus?” After all, several scientific
consensuses before 1985 turned out to be wrong or exaggerated, e.g.,
saccharin, dietary fiber, fusion reactors, stratospheric ozone
depletion, and even arguably acid rain and high-dose animal testing for
carcinogenicity.

One reasonable response might be that
anthropogenic climate change is different from the cited examples
because much more research has been done. And yet. One should always
keep in mind that a scientific consensus crucially determines and limits
the questions researchers ask. And one should always worry about to
what degree supporters of any given scientific consensus risk succumbing
to confirmation bias. In any case, the credibility of scientific
research is not ultimately determined by how many researchers agree with
it or how often it is cited by like-minded colleagues, but whether or
not it conforms to reality.

Britain's car industry can no longer rely on taxpayer 'emergency'
bailouts, new Business Secretary Vince Cable warned today. He said:'We
don't want to go around the country waving a cheque book.'

Mr
Cable also signalled that the Government was unlikely to give a big
taxpayer subsidy to help General Motors to have its new Ampera electric
car built in Britain at Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port. The plant builds
the Astra and currently employs 1,800 and the deal would create hundreds
more jobs. The company had sought about £300million from the previous
Labour Government.

But Mr Cable, who is to meet GM's Welsh-born
boss Nick Reilly to discus the matter within days, made clear today that
such large sums were now out of the question, though there may be some
help at the fringes in relation to training, apprenticeships, tax
breaks, and environmental measures.

He said General Motors had
not yet formally approached his Government about any grants to build the
Ampera in Britain, but noted that the car was an 'attractive
proposition' for the firm and that such projects 'shouldn't depend on
Government support.'

The Business Secretary told the Financial
Times online that the new Government would instead focus on indirect
ways to help industry: 'We're moving out of an emergency time, and
support will come in more indirect ways.'

GM UK bosses want to
build the Ampera in the UK from 2011, rather than see the work go to
Bochum in Germany. The UK is likely to be the largest European market
for it.

Vauxhall insiders said they hoped for a productive
meeting between Mr Reilly and Mr Cable, who is also to address a major
automotive summit in London on Wednesday, organised by the UK's Society
of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

A Labour pledge of a £5,000 discount for buyers of new electric cars is also likely to be axed.

The
new coalition Government did approve a grant for Nissan to build new
Leaf electric cars in Sunderland and a loan guarantee for Ford - both
deals agreed earlier with the previous Labour government.

Mr
Cable was speaking on his way to Toyota's factory in Burnaston where he
launched production of the first full petrol-electric hybrid vehicle in
Europe. The minister saw the first Toyota Auris Hybrid Synergy Drive
(HSD) vehicle driven off the end of the production line at the Burnaston
plant in Derbyshire. Petrol engines will be built at Deeside in North
Wales.

Mr Cable said: 'Toyota's decision to make Burnaston the
only plant in the world to build the Hybrid Auris is a strong
endorsement of the UK as a manufacturing base for the next generation of
cars. 'It is sending a signal to manufacturers that if you're not in
the UK, then you're missing out on all the strengths and skills that the
UK has to offer.'

After much reading in the relevant literature, the following
conclusions seem warranted to me. You should find evidence for all of
them appearing on this blog from time to time:

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all
logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level
rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the
average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting
point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the
Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which
NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees.
So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And
the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not
raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of
Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the
water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated
it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with
that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The
whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Sadly, what the
Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their
raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol
that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil
Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw
climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I
make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find
something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a
given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot
survive such scrutiny.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real
environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more
motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an
absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the
evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real
Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political
narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for
controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage
of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow
to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the
date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been
clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that
saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of
society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said
that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called
phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming
is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the
hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an
opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not
utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of
mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than
sensible.”

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so
Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people
want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing
all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the
real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better
than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all
Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a
Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global
Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie
panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a
new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The
real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly
wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly
"Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first
performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop.
Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first
performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience
walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate
are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913,
we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that
supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming
denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it.
That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses
believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say
that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed --
and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come
when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st
century as too incredible to be believed

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is
not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in
the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research
grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of
money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some
belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the
place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any
disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist
instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without
material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such
people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example.
Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that
instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious
committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them
to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them
to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth
and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES
beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any
known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough
developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil
fuel theory

SOME MORE BRIEF OBSERVATIONS WORTH REMEMBERING:

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of
duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is
nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run
the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to
avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943
in Can Socialists Be Happy?

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in
the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise
reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so
small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally
without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a
time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures
tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th
century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter
because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming
nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the
Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the
world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is
claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading.
Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it
to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than
7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility.
Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the
atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the
oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No
comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base
balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational
basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units
has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air
movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an
unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate
experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables
over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years
hence. Give us all a break!

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism
tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are
tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist
orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to
ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas.
So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to
be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with
tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can
afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society
today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were.
But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that
seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count
(we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader
base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an
enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I
am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by
an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In
such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and
are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts
production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to
be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to
every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper
was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film.
It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account
fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is
nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a
Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven
climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of
the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the
paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in
recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie
mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that
reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented
July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even
have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact
that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving
into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got
the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The
modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by
Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the
number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an
acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient
between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was
doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green,
Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished
the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in
Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in
1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and
economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The
correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."
So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the
Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature
rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if
measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been
considered.